I don't go to SE for the "venue". I usually get there via a Google search, which means the only draw is the content. And hopefully Google would give me the same info if it were on any other site that paid their writers.
you don't go for the venue, but others do - the asker and the answerer who generated the content in the first place. You're just getting the benefit of their exchange due to SE's existence. I don't understand why you have an issue with SE hosting content in exchange for permission to advertise on it. I have to pay amazon/digitalocean to host my content - if it costs something for a host to provide it then they can either make the money back somehow or constantly lose money.
But the only thing SE has to offer is other people's content. And I don't have a problem with them making money, but with not sharing any with the people who are the reason the site gets money. They're not even middlemen who take a cut, they're getting 100% of the revenue.
but that implies that content is the only valuable thing, and distribution and hosting are negligible. If anything, it's the other way around - content is abundant and quality distribution is the hard problem. That's the reason the marketing industry is one of the largest around.
If people want to try to make money from their Q&As they can post them on their own site and either charge for access or advertise, but then they'll need to market it to get revenue so then they become like an SE but only for their own content and they'll make very little money anyway. That's basically the position of a professional blogger and very few of those make any real money.
yeah - people who provide services become successful. It's a pretty good system as long as we can keep the less successful people out of poverty. Equality of outcome is possibly the worst idea in history.
of course - equality under the law. People like to act like equality of outcome is a natural extension from legal equality but it simply isn't.
I know we don't keep people out of poverty right now, and that's something that needs to be fixed. But if you think equality of outcome (i.e. eliminating economic disparity) is the solution to that then you may want to read up on the USSR and Maoist China. Capitalism is pretty good at raising the living standard of the whole population, even if it does end up creating billionaires at the same time.
I'm in favor of democracy. I think the government should represent each person's interests equally no matter how rich they are. I think the only reason we didn't have a violent worker's revolution in America is that we were able to pass the socialist platform democratically.
welfare existed long before socialism and is pretty distinct. Systems of welfare were passed democratically, as they should be. The main reason the West in general didn't have any worker's revolutions (excluding Spain) is that the capitalism+welfare situation we have actually works really well.
