Humanities & Cultures

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Human society and cultural news, studies, and other things of that nature. From linguistics to philosophy to religion to anthropology, if it's an academic discipline you can most likely put it here.

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AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media (www.404media.co)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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this is an interesting article on the difficulties of running anything as SEO makes everything worse, AI proliferates, and things generally get worse for journalism. probably best summarized by this paragraph:

The long answer is that, through our own reporting, we are realizing that in order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and control. To do that, we need your email address.

but it's a very good read in general, and i'd encourage you to read the whole thing.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I can see how most people would be turned off by having yet another website have their email address (even if it's honestly just for sending them the newsletter), but, at the risk of sounding like an advertising agent, there are solutions to that.

rambling that might sound a bit too much like advertising, feel free to skip

You can set up more or less complicated rules so that mails from [email protected] are automatically put into a folder that you created for newsletters. But that still leaves you open to them using a different address like [email protected] to sneak past that filter. Also, if (more like "when", honestly) their database gets leaked, you're going to receive a lot of spam mails from less reputable people. Or you create different email addresses for different websites and auto-forward those mails to your main account, maybe?

Alternatively, and that's the service I've been enjoying for the past months, you can use the mail service Port87. To be frank, it's still a bit buggy at times and it doesn't seem to work for every sender (for some encoding reasons, as far as I understood, DHL delivery mails just don't get loaded properly), but the idea is that you have built-in the ability to create sub-adresses and you only give out those sub-adresses to sign up for things. So my main address might be [email protected], but I would sign up as [email protected]. From what they know, my "real" adress is simply [email protected]. Even if that database gets leaked and I suddenly receive mails from "my bank" about needing to refresh my credit details, I would immediately see that it's in [email protected] instead of [email protected] and this likely is a phishing attempt. I'm gonna end this here, because I really don't want to seem like I'm just trying to advertise the stuff I use.

On the general topic: I feel for anyone who is trying to get into journalism and stuff like voice acting right now. Any article that reads a little weird and too stiff (same with voice-over in YouTube videos), I almost immediately scoff off (is that a word?) as being AI-generated and not worth my time. I wouldn't be surprised if, doing this, I already skipped one or two pieces of media that were actually from humans but those humans were still novices in their field.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Getting your own domain would allow you to give any and every website their own contact email as well, while allowing you to do lots of other stuff if you ever get the inclination. For less than 10 usd / year

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I never knew that having your own domain was that cheap! I'm pretty happy with Port87 at the moment, but I might use a custom domain in the future, if it's really that affordable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yep, does depend on the TLD. Some cost more than others. Most common ones average about $10 annually, with discounts on the 1st year.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can also do this in Gmail natively by using a plus sign instead of the hyphen. E.g. [email protected] will deliver, as the plus and everything between it and the @ are ignored. This may work on other platforms too.

Or, as mentioned in another comment, you can do this easily with a domain you own. Although you may get the occasional call from a merchant validating that [email protected] is an actual order.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Oh that's a cool and really helpful thing I didn't know about Gmail! I think I'll use the plus-trick for the few sites that won't play ball with Port87! Then, on that front, Port87 only has the advantage that people who try to mail the bare address would receive an automated response, telling them to use one of the sub-adresses (you can choose which to show in this automated reply).