So because VPN works for you, it’s impossible for it to not work for literally anybody else?

How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.

no one ever tactfully includes ads

This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.

Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.

While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not

Well, whatever the solution to this problem is, I’m fairly sure “put a blockchain on it” isn’t going to be it. Distributed ledgers do potentially have some uses, but using them to carry “proof of humanity” information doesn’t make much sense

Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)

Oh yeah it absolutely is bullshit, I’m not saying that. Or, well, it is true they’re likely collecting tons of data but it’s not like US companies don’t do it too and for reasons that are probably just as bad. This is why I tend to think that if you’re going to ban TikTok for collecting data, you can’t ignore Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple et al

Well, they’re totally different platforms . The rationale behind the TikTok ban (and I’m not saying I’m in favor of it or opposed to it) is that they can do spooky spooky things with your personal data and your attention – your opinions can be nudged once there’s enough data on you and your eyeballs are on the app half the day. And just to repeat, I’m not saying I agree with the ban (well, not with banning just TikTok anyhow…)

Temu and AliExpress have their own problems (like the absolutely mind boggling waste of finite resources) but nobody’s worried Temu is radicalizing boys or collecting tons of your personal data. And yes even Temu does collect data just like everyone else nowadays, but it’s a shopping site; compared to a social network there’s not all that much you can get out of your users or too many ways to really influence them outside of making them spend more money

You’re just throwing a tantrum at this point