Just like for our magazine, social media platforms are indispensable channels for all online media providers. We might as well say “that’s life, and things will surely stay like this for quite a while,” but these platforms seem to be trying to bite off bigger and bigger chunks of everything that’s not theirs yet.
The last of the Mohicans, the one tool that had not yet been gobbled up by the behemoths of the social media industry, which is affecting all areas of our lives, was the world of newsletters. Now, it looks like that will fall as well: a few weeks ago, Twitter announced the purchase of Revue, and now Facebook is said to be developing a newsletter app for “independent” writers. Let’s not even get into what these two companies mean by “independent,” but one thing’s clear as day: the era of newsletters is over in the sense that social media giants want to channel this format back to their platforms.
It seems like it’s business as usual: big tech companies are trying to secure their market advantage not by developing their products, but by suffocating their competitors. It’s slowly becoming self-evident even in the digital world that the most reliable tool of survival for independent sources is if we, as conscious consumers, buy “hand-made” digital content, or better yet: printed or other paid content outside of social media.
For now, we can innocently say that you should pay for content because we don’t have such a service yet, but we can’t rule that out in the future either, because free thinking and the exchange of ideas, and monopolistic content providers are mutually exclusive concepts.
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