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Top-level
 For years #media and other orgs have been saying "we can't move away, our audience is there" whenever a prospect of maybe not supporting centralized services came up. But that ignores the 1% Rule: "only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk". In other words, audience follows those who create. If media orgs moved, audience would move with them. In other words, they had it all backwards. 8 comments
And yes, I do believe media orgs bear *some* responsibility for and culpability in this crisis (for it is a crisis). A decade-long unabashed and often uncritical promotion of centralized services helped to entrench these services as online spaces for public debate. Now we're all paying the price.  @rysiek very much agree with this 👆 started saying long ago that it would become a problem, the way legacy media prostrated themselves at the feet of social media, gifting them unfettered gatekeeper status - no, I do not enjoy being right, and it wasn't particularly insightful of me; part of the problem is that it was obvious from day one, and yet they did it anyway...  @rysiek I don't disagree, but if you think about it, it makes probably makes sense to them because large media organizations are (mostly) profit driven private services that control the space for public debate. I'm not saying this is a good situation, but capitalism won that battle more than 100 years ago as far as I can tell. @bremner explanation is not justification. Saying *why* it is so doesn't make it okay that it is so. And in this case it perhaps even makes it worse. @rysiek Sure. But maybe it helps calibrate expectations. I don't think the New York Times (or Guardian, or ...) will save us. @bremner I never said they would "save us" (for whatever definition of "save" and "us" we might be using here). But they sure contributed to the crisis, which is the point I was making. @rysiek |
Gregory's Server
It's not just about fedi, and not an either-or.
There are newsletters. There is RSS. Media orgs could choose to keep some presence on :birdsite: and other walled gardens, but use it to funnel people to channels under their own control — instead of the other way around, which is what they've been doing for years.
Instead of "like us on FB" on their sites, how about "Follow our RSS" on their FB profile?
Many of us had been making these points for years. Media orgs did not listen. Will they now?