sandoooo

again, if you look at the whole system in aggregate, the existing practice is for GooFaceTwitBaba to farm out their moderation works to subcontractors, while also bending backwards to prevalent political headwinds to preserve their shareholder value. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they are free to leave the megaplatforms and become approximately completely irrelevant, thus achieving the exact same effect as being deplatformed.

>The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc.

But how has it been implemented in practice?

If you look at the raw numbers, generally we rely on the lowest bidders amongst Facebook/Google/Twitter's third-world-country subcontractors, as well as the Chinese government.

How about this one:

Critics agree that Mr Obama's middle name is Hussein and he is likely an islamic terrorist.

The first part is obviously true. For the second part, I am fairly certain I can find two people on 4chan who agrees with this, and they will certainly be critics of Obama.

Statements of objective truths can still be biased.

I am in wholehearted agreement on a tax on lies so long as I get to decide which articles are lies.

hah, if only it were that easy.

The paywalled stuff is bullshit too. Plus, they know they have a micro-targettable audience of suckers who are willing to pay.

The problem is that a lot of potentially viable content falls by default into the marginally-profitable category, where the small amount of utility they provide to the end-user is offset by the incessant user-monetization impulse.

A price floor splits these marginal works into three categories: those that become free, those that die off, those that become viable at high margins. This seems to be a pretty great outcome for consumers.

What it would do is put a price floor on content. People's willingness to pay, say, $5 instead of $1 for a piece of content is a strong filter, I'm pretty sure low-quality content that's purely CTA wouldn't survive.

If all you want to do is make money off of stock speculation, it doesn't matter much who's going to win between the FAAAs. You could just split your investment evenly or by market cap. Even the losers are going to hold their value quite well in the mid-term, there's plenty of time to exit before the writing's on the wall.

In the short term there's the whole coronavirus-and-shrinking-gdp-and-money-printing thing going on, of course, so who knows.

it's for market segmentation for advertisers. This way they can sell aggregate data and ad impressions that's targeted to a very specific and profitable segment.

Like google's 'flocks' concept, but maybe less moving pieces.

Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse iceberg.

Evidently some creators can make it work somehow, since there is more content than ever. It is difficult to convince people to pay more for stuff they're practically drowning in.

Maybe we should go in the opposite direction: tax the creators to decrease content generation in order to increase signal-to-noise on high-quality content. Or at least force marginally-profitable content to be released free or not at all.

For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere for free.

AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services are in general pretty crap right now.

I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy concerns.

Far as I can tell, the government has several levers that they are pulling/not pulling here (somebody correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just getting this out of news articles, not primary sources):

- they are partially directly subsidizing the cost of degrees for domestic students. The extent of subsidy has not changed in the new policy. (questions: is the direct subsidy the same for all degrees? do arts currently get more or less than STEM?)

- they set the fees that universities are allowed to charge students. In the new policy, the allowed fees for humanities have doubled, the allowed fees for STEM has decreased.

- also, there is HECS/HELP, which is a scheme where all domestic students (not PR/exchange) are allowed an interest-free, CPI-indexed loan that is only paid back slowly when the student's wages go beyond a certain threshold. This is for the full cost of the entire degree, and is a big part of why students tend to be price-insensitive.

- fees for international students are roughly 5x domestic students, and they don't get HECS/HELP. They are basically subsidizing the entire system. The covid situation has dried up this revenue stream and now the unis (who have not been financially prudent during the fat years) are deep in the red, with rumors of bankruptcy starting to circulate.

editorializing:

1. Arts and humanities are bad choices if you're already poor. If you're from a rich family it's actually pretty great - light course load, personal growth, better male/female ratio, etc. If you're poor and you do arts, you will have trouble getting a job. People should be allowed to choose whatever degree they want, but the government shouldn't subsidize bad choices.

2. The government seems to be implementing this in a suboptimal way. It seems that there is a fee increase but no decrease in subsidy (or there's a mismatch). I would just lower the subsidy for arts/humanities and allow a fee increase that matches exactly.

3. I doubt this will produce worse engineers. The engineering degrees in good unis are heavily sought-after and difficult to get in, and this just increases the number of applicants, while the number of available places won't change much. I think the largest effect is unis will spend more on marketing their arts degrees, since these will be more profitable going forward.

If it leads to the arts departments upping their game to attract students, it's probably a net plus.