Sep 10, 2024, 3:59 AMCohost shutting down (https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down) is sad but not surprising. Unfortunately.
People saying "I wish media was not like today! I'd gladly pay $N for a nice no-nonsense / no-ads social platform". And then they don't.
Sep 10, 2024, 4:00 AMAnd no mastodon/"fediverse" is not a sustainable and scalable answer. You still need someone to run the servers (costs $$$) and do moderation (costs human work and sometimes human misery).
Like, this instance running at all is a combination of Someone paying a $700 bill each.and.every.month, and about 5 moderators looking at reports and user registrations each.and.every.day. *So far* this has been working. Will it keep on working? Who knows! Forever? Probably not :/
@aras It's not just social media. No one wants ads but very few are willing to pay to get rid of them (and understandably they might not be able to, or too many subscriptions, etc.). I don't like ads myself but I've seen so many beloved websites go down because of lack of funding through "premium" channels 😕
Sep 10, 2024, 4:05 AM@romainguy Yup. Still, this is sad! But I don't know what the solutions could be :(
@aras Me neither 😕
@romainguy @aras a major frustration on this front is that consumer trust in the "pay for no ads!" model has forever been tainted by rug-pulls where the paid ad-free service later goes right back to serving ads anyway.