The Future is... Magazines?

[renegadefolkhero]

I was reading a Kotaku article about the number of gaming new sites that have emerged in the wake of Vox's absolute shittery wrt the sale of Polygon to a weird content farm. They mention:

• Rogue
• Post Games
• Design Room
• and the upcoming Mothership

Given the current state of the clearnet, the retreat to gated communities that require subscriptions for basic access and paid subscriptions for extra content, forums, and the ability to comment, makes sense. And honestly, I'm not sure there's any other way to do it right now. Content has to be gated because of bots hoovering up all the open access data. Ads have always been a flawed solution to, "How do we pay for this?" And the fact is, commenting isn't a right, it's a privilege, and we've established a significant chunk of anonymous commenters are bots or bad actors.

Basically, we're going back to magazines. A free subscription is equivalent to paging through a magazine on the rack until it's your turn at checkout, and a paid subscription is like having the thing delivered to your house.

Normalizing subscriptions means normalizing paying for things you like or find useful, even if you can technically get some of it free or find loopholes to get all of it free. It's a state of mind that didn't come naturally to me as someone who surfed the net for decades exchanging data or my eyeballs for services and reading material. But when I was looking into hosts for my video game blog, I was reacquainted with what it costs to run a site with reasonable uptime. It helped reinforce that if I like something, I have disposable income and can chip in, even if I don't necessarily care about or use whatever perks come with any given paid subscription. Subscriptions cut out the middle man (ads, and the mechanisms by which they're served). You're directly shelling out to the people who do the thing. And you want them to do the thing.

So within the past year I've been peeling off royalties to pay for various services and sites. I picked up a premium subscription at Pillowfort, even though I primarily lurk there, because I appreciated what they were doing. That got me visiting more regularly, and I've come to really enjoy opening my dash and perusing posts for about five minutes each morning as part of my routine. Now it feels more natural to chip in $5 here or there for blogs or news sites or whatever. Most subscriptions run $5 to $10 a month, so it does add up, but even this feels right. I can't read one million magazines a month, nor would that be good for me. But reading like 4 or 5 magazines with targeted, curated articles? Sure. Let's go. I mean, I don't NEED access to all the things. Just the ones that are most important to me.

If this is the future of the web, I'm okay with it.