For example, massive expansion of free to play games with cosmetic microtransactions.

When the game ends... what is it that you've bought? The cosmetics, you never bought the game. If they give you an offline "shooting range" mode where you can wander the maps in the cosmetics you bought, have they satisfied the requirements? Again, you never bought the game you bought the cosmetics.

A step farther, loot drops in loot boxes that take time to unlock, on the order of days, weeks or months. You buy something to accelerate the unlock process down to hours. What have you bought? Just a faster unlock of something you'd have received anyway. So what are you owed when the game goes end of life? You didn't buy the game, you didn't buy the contents of the lootbox.

They are also absolutely addictive as fuck, BUT I will say because they come in different strengths I found it relatively straight forward to quit them via tapering.

I was using 20 x 10mg per day and then bought strength 9mg, 6mg, 3mg, 1mg quit.

It was much much easier than trying to cold turkey which I also tried.

Your cast iron detection mechanism will be gone!

I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.

Some want a flagship model, some want a mid range, some entry level... all in small form factors and they won't compromise in order to settle for the one small model that's available.

Is there a lot of fan art, yes, there's also massive amounts of original works as well. There is no lack of either.

You could equally solve the issue by providing provisions for archival. Or a provision that requires a work to be freely available for sale.

The creator having a monopoly on the work seems to me to encourage the creation and sharing of work as intended.

In what way is the system as it exists currently failing to encourage the creation of new works?

https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1uwyuf1/psa_stol...

Here is an example of the theft you endorse.

Please go tell those people they should be happy for someone else to steal their work and charge for it even after they've given it away for free.

It doesn't matter whether "few" people make a living from it. Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Copyright going away would not guarantee you more of an audience.

The only thing it guarantees is that if you manage to write something that resonates with an audience you have the potential to earn a living from it. That is what you want to take away.

On the basis it's digital.

I don't care if it's digital, I care if it took time and effort to create. If it did, it does not matter if it's digital or physical, it's theft.

Copyright does not guarantee you an audience. Nothing guarantees you an audience, authors know this, everyone who creates anything ought to know this?

Copyright just says that if you DO manage to create a work that truly connects with an audience, you're in a position to make money off it because it cannot be stolen from you.

What is so wrong with that?

I don't think anyone has the right to take work I create, for free.

In the same way I have no right to walk into your house and use it for free.

In the same way you cannot expect me to turn up and work at your business for free.

I don't care what half delusional rubbish you come up with to justify your theft.

It's theft, you want to steal something you put zero effort into creating and use it as you see fit. No fuck you. If I want to give it away for free, that's my prerogative not your expectation, if I can monetise via merch or other means, that's my prerogative not your right.

You: I will steal this, consume it, reprint it as I see fit and you will earn nothing.

Yeah... I don't think your opinions are worth much.

Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.

And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.

This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.

They want it to go back to how it was circa the late 90's.

In a lot of ways they're going to get their wish. LLM's via endless spam and replacing google search have basically made monetizing legit and useful content impossible, so I imagine nobody will upload it anymore (except for on youtube which is still monetizable in a meaningful way)

Compared to the past there's basically no incentive to put useful info on the web any more, so it's just not going to happen.

I would guess I've actually tried to read more AI written stuff while checking out new stories than a lot of people in this thread.

In practice what I discovered is, AI spends a lot of words to say very little, its prose is quite annoying most of the time. It often makes mistakes in terms of continuity as the story continues.

Now both of those might be corrected with skilled enough use, but the real problem is it doesn't actually understand what makes a story (within a particular genre) "good" and I suspect to actually do that you need to seriously think about and practice writing itself. The process of doing it, is what makes you understand what it is you enjoyed about a genre in the first place and how to write your own.

Genres aren't static, often what readers want is an evolved version of what they've loved reading before, to repeat a piece of Thai wisdom, they want "same same but different" where LLM's will basically give you "same same".

But the principle of this can work on everything.

Own an iphone, apple can do the same tied to the apple account.

On a windows machine you can do the same tied the user account login for the child.

People will no doubt pick holes in something like this, but it's the least intrusive, least effort solution to the problem that will actually work.