Ebert is not amused.
There are deep tensions between freely available content creation tools, the need to those tools’ providers to afford to provide them, the users’ freedom to create with these tools. I think Ebert’s right to feel unhappy about the way these tensions are being resolved in Twitter. Clearly Twitter’s creators need income to keep going. And clearly the vast majority of their users wouldn’t pay for it directly. On the other hand, users are right to feel exploited when their words are used as bait. It’s just not how advertising is meant to work. Content creators and service providers should be compensated.
