To me the way Kagi curates its small web directory always feel contradictory to the spirit of independent web publishing because it seems like you have to submit entries through GitHub — a highly centralized platform owned by one of the largest tech companies.
kudos to you for figuring out a decentralized solution.
I hope platforms like these find a way to attract people outside tech circles. I looked at around a dozen recommended sites and only two of them isn't the personal website of someone who works in tech and writes mostly about tech, which gets boring rather quickly.
There is a world of non-tech bloggers writing stuffs about history, culture and nature who would likely never learn about this project simply because they are not in the right social spaces. I hope there is a way to have them in the ecosystem too.
I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about.
In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.
Except Squarespace does not just sell hosting. Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use.
You and I know how to build and host websites, ok, but it had likely taken us dozens if not hundreds of hours of learning everything between TCP/IP to ARIA attributes to get here. The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.
> Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use.
Yeah, like I said, it costs close to $0.
> The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.
My point is, SquareSpace could charge a fraction of what they do and still be rolling in cash. Instead they charge ridiculous fees that simply go to pay for more ads.
I think you're thinking marginal costs. Only charging for marginal costs will put you out of business almost immediately. There are plenty of non-marginal costs that need to be covered, which will make it "not close to $0".
If you think I'm talking nonsense, make sure you know what the term actually means: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginalcostofproductio... There's a common misuse (unless it has become so common that it's just another definition, if you're a descriptivist grammarian) to use it to mean "small, negligible", but I'm using it in the real business/accounting sense. Of all the industries, tech is among the worst in terms of being unable to charge based on marginal costs; so often our marginal costs are effectively $0 but the fixed costs of what we have are millions to billions of dollars.
To think about this from another angle, imagine yourself as a worker selling your labor in exchange for money. Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim in cash, or would you take as much your company is willing to pay you to work there? If your answer is no, then why should a company selling a product act any differently?
If squarespace following free market 101 upsets you so much, maybe you should start a squarespace competitor and charge whatever you think is a fair price. If what you said is true then you should be able to undercut squarespace by a huge margin and still make a profit. Give it a try and tell us how it goes.
> My point is, SquareSpace could charge a fraction of what they do and still be rolling in cash. Instead they charge ridiculous fees that simply go to pay for more ads.
This is the classic sentiment by which one can tell that the person has no idea how businesses/markets work.[1]
The only relationship between the cost and the price is that the former is a floor for the latter. The price is determined by the value it brings to the one paying for it. If it is less than the cost to build, you don't have a business. If it's 1000x the cost to build, then you charge 1000x. Why would you charge less?
If the cost was so close to $0, and they charge $20/month, all that means is that there's an opening for you to set up the same business and charge, say, $15/mo.
I thought SS charged a lot more. Frankly, $20/mo is a steal. If a restaurant can't afford to pay $20/mo to acquire customers, they're not in good shape at all.
Realistically, most people don't have the expertise of setting up HTTPS enabled web hosting on nginx (maybe Caddy will be easier.) There is just so much prerequisite knowledge for a non technical person to know. What they do instead is either
- Pay for a shared hosting plan on one of the big players like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostinger.
- Install wordpress in one click
- Do everything in Wordpress.
- Pray that no one ever hacks their Wordpress installation
Or
- Pay for an agency
- Have an IT professional — like you and me — make the website, and put a link in the website footer saying "website designed by XYZ Inc."
From my personal experience I'd add a lot Director/Sr Director in relatively technical companies who manage scores of web application developers. So when you say most, it could literally be almost everyone.
People from the countryside were forced into cities in Britain as a result of the Enclosure acts, reduced demand for agricultural workers, population rises etc
Revealed preference could just show it was the least bad option in that period
I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.
It is an interesting view point. The core issue is journalists have just become middle-men in a free information era and demanding money for it. Like I said, what's to stop me (or someone) to simply write a crawler/agent that just gathers data on a bunch of sites where information is curated (like X, HN, Reddit) and presenting it to me in a readable format? I think people see this and hence the reluctance to pay. The average Joe gets his news from social media (Facebook / Instagram / X / etc.) and doesn't think any online news journal is worth paying $20/month for.
It only proves my point - if journalists really added value - like reporting on something that you can't just find out by browsing social media, maybe they would have a chance. But, what we see and have is only just sloppy reporting.
Not all information is out there for free, monetarily and in terms of personal liberty. News articles frequently quote "sources inside" some three letter agencies or major corporations who will face consequences if they speak to the public under their real names, and will be rightfully dismissed if spoken anonymously without a journalist being able to ascertain their identity. There is also information that is only spread behind closed doors — trade shows, conferences, sometimes even governmental meetings — where the participants may not want the public to know what they are doing. Then there is the investigative digging, knowing who to ask questions and what questions to ask…
I understand you may think all journalism is just reddit and twitter compilations but it was not always the case. Most people, you likely included, do not even know what they are missing out when their local journalism collapses (again, due to loss of newspaper sell and classified ad revenues) and leaves everyone in the dark about what is going on in local politics.
> News articles frequently quote "sources inside" some three letter agencies or major corporations who will face consequences if they speak to the public under their real names, and will be rightfully dismissed if spoken anonymously without a journalist being able to ascertain their identity. There is also information that is only spread behind closed doors — trade shows, conferences, sometimes even governmental meetings
Your argument just revolves around the edge cases of journalism and that's exactly my point. Many of the so-called "news" sites aren't that. They are just scraping off content on the internet and slapping ads over them. So many clones of Mashable, for instance.
>Most people, you likely included, do not even know what they are missing out when their local journalism collapses (again, due to loss of newspaper sell and classified ad revenues)
While there is some merit to this argument, not always. Most of what we read today are just the opinions of the news, rather than the actual news itself. The people giving their opinions on the news aren't even qualified in the subject matter to begin with. So, strictly speaking, if a news organization collapses - it's just survival of the fittest. It's a free market and if you don't add value, people will just move on.
I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.
> if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry)
Then the industry itself would not be very sustainable, wouldn't it? In that case, I would expect the industry to radically change or to disappear like many other industries whose expectations were made unsustainable by tech progress. For some reason, we're incredibly excited of it happening to coding, music, art, but not to journalism. Journalism must survive in its current form at all costs.
To me the way Kagi curates its small web directory always feel contradictory to the spirit of independent web publishing because it seems like you have to submit entries through GitHub — a highly centralized platform owned by one of the largest tech companies.
kudos to you for figuring out a decentralized solution.
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