We Need Your Email Address
www.404media.co
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.

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.

  • Crotaro@beehaw.org
    0·
    2 years ago

    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 imanewsletter@newsman.gg are automatically put into a folder that you created for newsletters. But that still leaves you open to them using a different address like marketing@newsman.gg 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 crowbro@port87.com, but I would sign up as crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. From what they know, my “real” adress is simply crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. 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 crowbro-newsletter@port87.com instead of crowbro-mybank@port87.com 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.