n the grand scheme of things, the fate of one website is an
insignificant drop of rain, but the world is full of little shoots
who need that rain to tell them they're right about everything and
everybody else is an idiot. But as the Internet, as with
all forms of communication,
turns into a political cesspool, that gets harder to do. Much as artistic
car license plates filled with pictures of animals that everybody hates
(like woodpeckers) are a sign that the state issuing them is becoming
a bad place to live, there are two signs that precede the decline of
any website.
They aren't necessarily the cause of it, but more like what doctors call a opportunistic infection. When a patient's immune system gets screwed up as a side effect of some drug they used to treat the side effects of the previous drug, a normally harmless infection like JC virus can come along, get into their brain, and finish them off with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. (Yes, we have a rule here that every article must be about brain disorders.)
Old-fashioned paywalls were better
1. Paywalls
One is a paywall. Putting up a paywall means one of three things: (1) the site is running out of money; (2) they had money at one time, but they spent all of it on hookers; or (3) they're tired of their readers always making fun of everything they publish.
In the latter case, it means they're so ashamed of their own crazy opinion that they slap it in a virtual padded cell, as some science websites are doing, so nobody can read it. Elsewhere it means the owners have abandoned their dream of being part of the national dialogue and gone corporate, which means the criterion now is whether it's wanted by the six remaining subscribers and the seven deadbeats—not to be confused with the Seven Badly Rendered Gender-Impaired CGI Deadbeats With Achondroplasia in that Snow White movie—who failed to respond to your ‘Final Notice’.
The most effective paywall is the paywall landmine, which is an antipersonnel device that goes off should a reader mistakenly think something is worth reading. The foolish reader gets to paragraph six before getting blasted with a demand for money to read the rest, giving him a virtual brain concussion. The goal is to give him PTSD and infuriate him or her into swearing you off once and for all.
However it's done, paywalls narrow the readership to those who are fanatically loyal to the ideology on your website. If you think your publication doesn't subscribe to any ideology, that's proof that you've already been boxed in by it.
Ideology isn't just left vs right. It is the promotion of one point of view and inhibiting the other. Science, religion, raising puppies, and flower arranging, however benign they look, are all ideologies. Just try to find an article hating on puppies on a puppy site or an article challenging global warming on a science site. It can't be done.
Ideologies are always based on people's vested interests: science is dependent on big government, so science journals all think we need bigger government. That pushes them left. Anyone to tries to make government smaller, even if the goal is to save it, is a threat. Those of us who just want to be left alone become libertarians. That means we drift to whichever party promises to leave us alone the most—and sometimes it's a tough call.
Sometimes websites drift in ways we don't expect. Why would a UK computer news site sound more and more like the politicized tech site Ars Technica and stop publishing articles on BGP routing protocol in favor of red meat for their Musk-hating readers? Or why would a supposedly libertarian car review site stop talking about cars and drift into a loony antisemitic conspiracy world where Trump is the leader of a Zionist cabal?
2. Comments
The reason is that they're exhibiting the second sign of incipient website dementia: commenter-induced dysphoria. Writers like being liked almost as much as they like being paid, so if you allow comments the writers read them. It would take a soul of titanium not to skew your writing according to what the commenters want, especially if your job is insecure.
Eventually commenters figure that out. They see an empty text box and a captive audience in an article on B52s finally getting AESA and pounce on the opportunity to force their stupidest thoughts into the unwitting reader's brain. Other times, they post the same comment over and over to make it appear that there's a big consensus when in fact it's just one guy whose levomepromazine fell behind the couch. The goal is to push the website toward their ideology.
UK tabloids are way ahead of us. They figured out long ago about their readers, so they wisely block comments for anything remotely controversial, like somebody dying or going mad, because they know the commenters will join together in celebration just to get them in trouble with Ofcom.
It works: your bandwidth expenses go almost to zero, and no more troublesome commenters. Problem solved!
mar 31 2025, 5:17 am
