Ignore the noise. Big players in the space will always draw criticism. There's a huge difference between an organization and an individual. There's value in what you do, and I appreciate your work.

I agree on contributing back to a community and there's many ways to do that. That's not every producer's motivation though. Some do this to get paid and it makes sense to publish behind a paywall to do so.

Follow up question. What are opinions on publishing technical books?

This is a great followup question.

I don't have an opinion on technical books. I buy them. I have ebooks from Amazon to iBooks, to Manning, Apress, Pragprog ....

I don't have something against paying. I have something against subscription paywall. I pay this month and I read something. Then next month if I want to read my subscription needs to be valid.

A book once bought I can read it anytime I want.

Also my main thing is not even with paywall.

It is a trend I saw which I think it makes the path of self-through beginner harder. Also Medium started to appear from time to time higher than other resources.

I am working with some people who are trying to switch to IT and I usually need to explain to them either how to open Medium to read the article or how to go to next resources. I am pretty sure some of them are spending time navigating information. Yes, maybe the solution is to say: go and make a subscription to Medium, but it just raises the bar of entering the IT.

Then my second thing is this: what happens with all that content when Medium decides to go away (pivot, close ...)? It will vanish like many other great content online.

The idea of free journalism sounds great until it's all ad driven and click bait-y. A digital news subscription cost less than $1 daily and it's still a challenge to convince people to commit to one. I'm glad some long form journalists are moving to substack.

I have subscribed to like seven newspapers this year and i have to say their use of technology is awful. They should get a revenue sharing system like ASCAP for music - I pay so much per year and then they distribute it amongst the sites I view. I only want to check Houston papers when they have flooding but I don’t want them to die out. I only want to read Wilmington paper when they get a hurricane or a spike in Covid cases in the nursing homes, but I can’t see paying $1000 per year for all of the places I click in on from time to time.

It's just the price of making a successful bet. Critics were fine with it when they were confident it would fail. They just can't stand being wrong so they're making an effort to make it true.

I'm not sure if this is a funding problem. US public schools spend almost the same amount per student ~10k. I find it more likely that there's a difference in how resources are allocated in public vs private institutions.

I agree, there's a lot of fluff in business/productivity/self-improvement books. They're repetitive and often refer to the same decade old studies. I've also found that I need to be in the proper state of mind for a message to sink in. Maybe the regurgitation helps but I should reread a good book instead.

And practically any company can build as many billboards as they want. Online ads aren't restricted by physical space. Google just happens to own most web traffic because they're really good at search.

Maybe a better analogy is Google owns the biggest road system (search) and all land beside it for billboards (ads). Very few people use other road systems.

Now, one might say "But users can choose other search engines." But users are the resource, not the customers. Right now, Google controls most of these resources. And the very nature of search means they're not sharing access with competitors.

Another way would be to print lots of money and redistribute it until you've satisfied your equality threshold.

The market/price system is the world largest information system. Printing money distorts that system and make it function poorly and throughout history has been disastrous.