Welp, this didn’t take long.
It’s especially interesting that they laid off a lot of people who were the only ones in their particular job, leaving entire jobs uncovered. I suspect this comes right before shutting them entirely or doing it all “with AI” 🤮.
Sad in particular about Alice Bell. She was fantastic, and it always felt like she kept the site going through all the shit of recent years. Plus being the driving force behind their podcast (the Electronic Wireless Show) of course also spells doom for that one though I hope that like Indiescovery they go rogue and run it independent of the site.
Bleak times. Fuck IGN.
We need more worker owned associations and more workers’ rights. This is ridiculous.
We also need people to realize that it’s not sustainable to expect free content while running an ad-blocker.
The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.
I don’t. I expect the vast majority of people will continue to demand free content while simultaneously complaining about the quality of said content.
Yeah, unfortunately many people seem to default to complaining about things while continuing to consume what they are fed. And not change anything, of course.
I disagree. Ads are not the answer. Treating them as such is simply giving up.
Agreed, ads are not the answer. Paying for content is the answer.
But people want their content to be free, while also being angry that their free content contains ads.
Because content distributors haven’t thought of another way to get money. The only other thing they came up with is subscriptions. Some have thought of donations, but they haven’t banded together to come up with an alternative. It’s weak and totally mid.
i’ll turn off my adblocker when i can be confident that your site won’t show me ads for child porn or actual fucking scams.