of note:
The 404 team DIYs as much as possible. They pay for hosting through Ghost and set up litigation insurance, for example, but everyone makes their own art for stories instead of paying for agency photos. (The reporters are also the merch models). Everyone works from home, so they don’t have an office and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon. The team communicates through a free Slack channel. Koebler mails out merchandise from his garage in Los Angeles. Every month, the team meets (virtually) to decide how much they can pay themselves. (The number changes each month, but everyone gets paid the same amount.)
This almost makes me want to give them my email address, or at least a throwaway, but I really don’t want to encourage that behavior.
If a couple of decades and some change on the internet has taught me anything, it’s that toxic, abuseable change is insidious. Subscription models for games seemed pretty harmless when it was just a handful of MMOs. Consolidating more user-directed social interactions into an algorithmic feed seemed like a pretty good idea in 2009.
But now, in 2024, when a company tries to get me to play along with something I try to think of what the wider implications would be of other companies adopting the same model. How many websites would start asking for email addresses? How long until they start doing shady things with them?
I know that I can send something off to a junk address that will expire or that I’ll just never check, but for most users it’s just a massive spam vector for what is likely to be their only email address. It’s not really something I’d like to encourage.
Goofy name aside, they sound like a pretty alright company other than that. Love the idea of a journalist-owned outlet, but I’d be even more into the idea of a journalist-owned outlet that’s more concerned with setting an example for the future health of the internet than with self-protectionism.
For what it’s worth they are aware that some of their readers do not like the email subscription model. They acknowledge it isn’t a perfect solution but they also don’t have many alternatives currently as a small, independent media company trying to survive and grow.
I know you’re not alone with the opinion that a website asking an email address to create an account is dangerous, but frankly I still don’t understand the slippery slope argument attached to it. There are laws governing email marketing nowadays (CAN-SPAM in the US), as any actual business fucking around will find out.
In my humble opinion, an important lesson we can take from the last decades of the web is to be wary of a private free lunch. The Google search engine has never required an email and yet today they sit on an empire based on the exploitation of our data. In that sense, paying for a service is much more honest than mining the users’ privacy and selling it to advertisers (as mentioned in some hermetic Terms of Agreements & Conditions). The system may not be perfect, but asking an email address is the least invasive way to recognize someone that paid for a service.
Also, what do you mean by “self-protectionism”? It sounds like a derogatory euphemism for “making a living”. It’s fine for four journalists to live from their profession. I think paying human sized businesses for services is quite different than doing the same with disruptive, market devouring corporations.
Remember when Substack, the home of many excellent journalists, started to defend fascist and white supremacist content on their platform?
Oh, wait, that’s happening right now.