Future of Independent Journalism Tools

No one asked for this. Nobody wants it. And the constant parl clutching is literally leading to censorship. There's no other reason this has all getting censored other than it helps these companies make money due to the sensitivities of advertising . Hello and welcome to the four hundred four media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four media is a journalist and a comp any and needs your support. To subscribe, go to four media.co . As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments , and they get early access to our interview series too. Gain access to that content at four media.co . This week I'm speaking to Jake Hamerhan. He is the founder of Popular Front and Independent , conflict focused media outlet. There's a podcast, they do documentaries as well. But recently, Jake has branched out into another project called Away Days, which is more about counter culture . And I wanted to speak to Jake because obviously he is also an independent journalist. He's actually been in the independent space longer than we have, you know, getting close to ten years for him. And I think the ecosystem around tools and platforms has changed a lot for the better for independent journalists. You know, we're able to run a website and take subscriber money like in a very streaml ined fashion. That said, platforms, social media , YouTube, places like Patreon as well, potentially have maybe not become hostile to independent media. That would be too much, but like there's a lot of friction there and Jake has experienced some of that for his company as well. So I wanted him on to talk about all of that and what sort of thing would be good to be developed for independent journalists. All right, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Jake, thank you so much for joining us. I really, really appreciate it. Thanks, Mike, big fan of what you're doing. I've been a day one subscriber . I don't have my popular front on shirt right now. That's why I've got a flag . I often do wear that . For those who don't know , what is popular front? And how did that come about? So basically popular front, I started it in twenty eighteen and at the time there was a lot of very just normal tiny follower accounts doing a lot of incredible work . For example , Hugo Carmen always comes to mind. He had like three hundred followers on Twitter and was doing some of the best Osym work and geolocation I've ever seen in my life . And I know his journalists, you know , as the journalism industry is, we're essentially just cribbing his work, you know, and like not mentioning him. And I was like, this is bad. And then I started seeing it happening a lot. And then I realized like we should all be working together sort of thing, you know ? And also I realized a lot of these people that were doing this work were kind of like me, kind of like , I guess unconventional, I would say we're also, you know what I mean? Not in a bad way. And so I was like, fuck, I'm going to start this whole thing. My idea was to launch an independent war reporting platform , but with the soul left in, which maybe that sounds corny, I don't mind . But you know what I mean? I wanted to really I'd been to war for so long and I just kept seeing the kind of essence of what made it so fascinating removed, you know, and what made the people both good and bad so visceral. And so yeah, I guess popular front was kind of my punk esque idea of doing more reporting and thank God it took off because I was ready to quit at the time actually. So yeah, it's it's gone well we're in the year eight it's on the up and up . I But guess one of the reasons we're going to be talking is because we've had a big problem particularly with censorship, especially with our documentaries. Yeah, yeah. We'll get to that. In a practical sense, what does popular front do its documentaries, it's written stuff, it's your podcast as well. Like how do you take that ? And how does it manifest basically? What do you make? Yeah, so the bread and butter has always been the podcast because at the time I just had absolutely no money whatsoever to start the thing. So I was like, well, I have I know how to use my earphones as microphones . And basically the first episode just sounds so bad. But you know, I did it with that. And I remember within ten episodes I don't want to say blew up but it really took off quite quickly and I just feel like I maybe just noticed a little gap maybe where there was not enough of these kind of anaraki type people being taken seriously and for me those were just the best people as well. And they didn't have this . I don't want to be negative, but I definitely had I was very jaded, if you could say, like, from doing war reporting and just meeting some very snooty people within it, you know, and I didn't want any of that. And I wanted to do popular front without any of that kind of elitist arrogance, you know, and without any of like too much polish, you know, like our catchphrase has always been , well, first of all, it's warfare for weirdos for about three weeks , but I realized people didn't want to come on with that. So I changed it to no thrills. I remember you changed like the tagline in the podcast. I was like, hey, he stopped saying nerds or whatever you say. Yeah. Nice and geeky because like we started to have like very like, you know, a lot of people start coming on and I just I was like, you know what? Like it's moved on a little bit from that. It kind of started off as this very niche thing and now we're kind of an independent warping platform, you know, and we start doinged documentaries when we started making money on the Patreon and that really blew us up. You know, like that when we started doing the docs, I kind of used the same style as the podcast, you know, very scrappy, kind of irreverent, but heavy on the journalism and also non biased, you know, especially at that time to really make money in that in that world, you had to be left wing or right wing or conservative. And we were just like, look, man, you know, like we don't like authoritarianism where ver it is is. And that kind of give us a very eclectic audience , which I think is great. But yeah, so we did the documentaries . We did the magazine, which is all on hold for a long time just because the sheer insane amount of it cost tos send stuff now with you and everything. But yeah, we do merch, believe it or not, our merch funds a lot of our projects it does really well. It's it's very good merch. Like I'm constantly checking the store in case you've done something and then I'll go and check for the cap. I think there's the one with the world on fire right or something. And it's just like it sold out. Fuck . Yeah, we got a new one now called Send Baron. It just says send yeah I saw that . So you know, we try to always do kind of irreverent kind of cool merch to kind of I guess someone said to me once like , Oh, you're running this like a hardcore band and I never thought of it like that. And I was like, yeah, I like the idea of that. So some people don't like it. I totally get that. I mean, I'm particularly annoying and opinionated, but overall it's been, you know, it's been a pretty good ride. Certainly, wherever we go now, everywhere we go, there's someone is like, we just have so many lovely stories from people that are like, oh, I never thought I was the sort of person that could do war reporting or conflict journalism, but seeing popular front made me realize I can. It's like, yeah, if I can, trust me, she can, you know what I mean? So, you know, in our audience, we don't care where you're from, your gender, your race, or whatever. If you're good, you're good. We don't care about certificates. You know, I don't have any. So and I think that really appealed to a lot of people. So, you know, it's been good fun. For sure. So you do that and it goes on the up and up as you say and then you decide to I guess launch away days as well, which yeah, I'll let you phrase it. But to me it looked, like a series of document aries that were about things that weren't necessarily conflicts, essentially, right? Like what is the way days and how did you come to the decision to do that? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's kind of popular front book for counter cult ure, if you like, you know, I you know, I've been doing war reporting for so long. I first went to the front line when I was like twenty four. I'm thirty six now and for anyone that's and God I've been to a dozen wars, you know, and it kind of you do start to feel your luck running out, which sounds crazy, but to me you kind of do. And you know, I've had a few close calls and various family circumstances. I can't die out there, you know, and I certainly I've always been interested. I mean, if you read my book Gargoyle, it's I've never just been a warrior. I've always done like counter culture, black markets. Well, you did a ton of silk road shirts as well. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I actually was , I think, the only reporter that went and traveled with a silk road drug dealer to his actual manufacturing house where he had all these drugs. But yeah, so I did all this underground stuff anywhere and I was like, well, how about I turn that into a documentary thing? And you know, my friends said Oh just bring it into popular front, but I feel like that would have been a mistake because I feel like too often you know I got my start vice right Vice became everything and I think too often niche kind of platform s lose their edge when they try and do everything. Like, I mean, you can't go from well, we're war on conflict, but now we're war on conflict and counter culture. It just didn't work. So I was like, you know, I'm going to start a different thing. And for some reason people like, oh no, popular front overs. I said, No, you know, there's plenty of hours in the day. Just stop scrolling and you'll find time, you know? So I do both, you know, but Away's is definitely a lot more specific as in it. It's just a documentary series, you know, like we're having so much fun with it. It's a lot more polished , you know, really specific access , but it's not like a whole network and so I can run both at the same time. And you know, so far we've had two docks out. We've got about five ready to edit. It's just money is an issue. But the first stop was we spent like a week inside the Favela in Brazil with a gang and it wasn't to be like whoa, we're in the Favela. It was kind of to be like actually this is really sad, you know, and it did really well. Like that's that's pushing up to a million now. And then the second one we did really fun doc umentary is a documentary about Kazakhstan football hiligans, which, you know, it's just like you would never think these things exist , but we kind of go to not to gauk at them, just to be like, how beautiful is vitality, you know? And then there are other episodes that are very dark, you know, we got like an underground fighting no rules fighting episode coming. We got something fun with underground legal street racing in Japan. You know, like anything that's kind of like that, I like it and I want to know about it. And the people involved you meet are just so fascinating and cool to be around quite often. So yeah, I wait has been great fun as well. And there's a lot less risk of dying. Yes . Well , I mean, but then you're also in the car , the Japanese drifters and the street racers. So I don't but also they know how to drive so, you're probably easy . When they're doing like a hundred drifting sideways down the side of a mountain, I was a bit like, What the hell am I doing here? But it's definitely a I mean the way I'm wide man, I need some kind of something to blow my hair back, you know, and I think Away is definitely a lot safer , but it's also, you know, again, it feeds that fascination I have with just outside of society stuff, you know, which war is as well. I mean, it takes place within it, but the kinds of people that end up fighting are usually those that they become transformed, you know, and I really like the idea of like when someone is kind of almost alchemically transformed into someone else when they're involved in their scene, you know, like, you know, from the main character in our Kazakhstan documentary , by day he works valeting like cars , you know, but then on the weekend he's like a hero of the forest fighting in groups and, you know, and then has all his friends and then he goes to the mosque and he's chilled out like just so many layers of people I think that's what I'm focused on often. Same with the war reporting as well. Like our docks have rarely being straight news reports, you know, we do them, but we can never be first or we had to be unique, I think. Yeah, that's a good point. Is the business of away days like entirely separate from the popular front and like you're treating them as like two streams, like not to get like two inside baseball, but like you mentioned money for the away days one. It's entirely separate. Yeah, yeah, exactly because it just I didn't want any one to think I'd fluke something. Well, to be honest to myself, you know, and I was like, can I build another thing? Obviously, granted, I've got a lot more reach now and like eyes on me from popular front, but I wanted to do it completely separate. So I think of it is imagine it's like Jake Canner and the channel , you know, and then each one is like , you know, a vertical or a series or whatever. So they're separate, but they're within the same wheelhouse. All my production company and the same team, exactly the same team that does popular front, does away days. But it was just kind of almost a challenge to myself and also like I was like, I can't be taking all the money out of popular front and be spending it on a holaysid. Like that's why it's so slow. You know, if I did that we like the docks would be flying out but it's very slow. People like oh you've only put two docks I'm like you know how fucking expensive this is to do this you know without kind of crossing the streams. So it it is what is. At the start, we just maxed out credit cards. And then the merch is doing quite well. We've made some money back on that. And then we're in talks with some people to try and get some funding , which is looking good. We have actually no I've not told anybody this but we're actually doing a collaboration series with VICE soon and it's going to be like Azon VIC but it's going to be much shorter so like fifteen minute kind of segments. It was going to be called hard week like Weddings presents Hard Weekend, but we're going to have to change the name because they already have something similar. But yeah, that's going to come out this year and that will be fun. And I think that will bring a lot more eyes and hopefully revenue . And if not , it doesn't, you know ? And if not, it still gets the stuff out. You still get to make it. Exactly. You gotta do it, man. I really mean, it's easy to say when you've been doing it ten years, but the same way I tackled this now is the same way I did at the start, you know, the reason I got my job advice was I got a friend of mine that I knew was studying photography and I was like, does that have film mode? He's like, yeah, I think so. And we just went at the time we went I was like, I want to go to Occupy not occupy Wall Street, it was occupied London. It was a stock exchange and then it moved to St. Paul's. And we just went down there and just filmed and like did random interviews with people and even though it was absolute trash, I think they realized like okay you're getting, off your house you're doing and I think that still kind of counts exactly as you guys did. You were like, right, this isn't working. Okay, let's go and do it. And you just have to do it, you know, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on that, there's the making the journalism and the filming and the writing and the recording or whatever. And then there's the distribution, which frankly when I worked at Vice , I didn't give a shit about because I didn't have to. I was an intern. I rocked up on my table at the London Viceice Off or wrote my shitty little blog post and it went out on the internet. I didn't have to worry about any of that. But now when you run your own media business , you have to figure out how the hell am I going to get this in front of people, not necessarily to be like , Oh, I won't clip someone's views, but you do want people to see it because of course watch the entire moment. Of course . Yeah, I've always said that like never ever. I don't get what people like, oh, you know, I don't want to be narcissist. Like what are you talking about? You make this a show people. I don't want a niche group. I want as many people to see what I'm doing. It's journalism, you know? You distribute on a few different platforms. We also do the same and I'll go like specifics sort of one by one, but like YouTube obviously, key for you, putting out documentaries. But you've had some stuff with YouTube, right? Where maybe have they like demonetized videos or taken them down? Like, what's the deal with YouTube and you? Yeah . So I mean I will say I do think YouTube is still an excellent platform and I do I'm very glad it's there, but the censorship issues are just beyond the pale, you know, it's like North Korea it's crazy. I mean, we had we had a clip a short, a reel that were short as they are and they're taken down because it was had the word hooligan in the thing and it was deemed as promoting violence. I was like what? Like, you know, we weren't saying this is great. Anyway, whatever. It was a piece of journalism about Huluk and this. Exactly. Yeah, of course, you know. And I think maybe because we showed them in a decent light because this isn't street stuff. This is all private in the forest and I was like, who cares, you know? But anyway, so the problems began pretty early on with popular front. So the way that I edit, the way that I produce my stuff, I don't really have a wagging finger , you know? I'm like, this is what's happening . And I certainly would edit my stuff. Like if we're in a riot, you're going to see we're in a riot and it's going to feel fun to watch the same way it would to be in it. You know, and a lot of journalists say, Oh no, it's not that it is, you know, it absolutely is. It's not that I've been done wrong. I've been shot in a riot like with a big rubber bullet that like scrambled my innards. I'm not saying that's fun. And at that same riot, someone lost their eye, you know, but I'm saying like there is part of it. There's maybe not fun, but like there is some exhilaration to it, you know, so I was like, well, I want surely as a journalist you want to get across that because that's a lot of why actually people are involved in riots and stuff like that , you know? It's not all political. So I was like, that to me makes, you know, it's no brainer. I'm going to edit it to make it feel as close as I can for the viewer to what it feels like to be there. And you know, I stand by that. I always have some people say it's gratituitous. Those same people are now happily posting a you know warf from Ukraine with Silly Music suddenly it's different it's different when they support the war. But anyway , but yeah, I don't think it is. I think it's more hon est actually. I think it's super honest. And so anyway, so immediately we were getting a bit of like, you know, this has been aid restricted, this has been put behind whatever. And then we had our big kind of breakout with plastic defense. Of course, the documentary about three D printed guns, JSTAC, and that hit like a million views very quickly for us because we were like, I think we had twenty thousand subscribers before that if that, and it just went off. And because of that, in some ways we started getting eyes on us, right? So the whole channel got demonetized. Basically they were just like, yeah, you're not going to make any money now. And but the irony is they didn't take the dock down or even actually aid restricts plastic defense. So I presume they were like, well, we're making money from this. You know, so it carried on because I know to this day there's adverts on it, but I don't make any money from it. You know, we had we got some footage from a Sakario filmed on his phone and just showed what is actually a very grim representation of life in the cartel. And that did really that blew up in Mexico. Mexicans were like, this is great. Like this is reality. So that did really well. Some of my big news channel over there were kind of talking about. I didn't even know. So they made God knows how much money off that. We didn't make a single penny. So basically long story short, we didn't make a single penny from any of our documentaries. Bear in mind you're looking at five to ten grand loss every time, you know, which is a little it's very little money for what we were doing, but we do everything on a shoe stream. And I was editing them all. So I was like, you know what, I can accept that because every time we had a dock went out, we got more on the Patreon, we got more support, more merch. So I was like, you know, it's not exactly like we're not getting paid for the docs, but it kind of evens itself out . Then they started age restricting things. And as I'm sure you know, when they age restrict things, it's gone essentially, you know, it doesn't work the same way. It just falls off the face of the earth . What they started doing was what I was calling like retroactively age restricting. So our last documentary the one I was on about shot in the belly. I think we were the only people that were interviewing every part of the people involved in the very intense riots that were happening in Paris , not just for Mayday, it was on Mayday. We went, but it was like a long, continuing thing for about six months . And it got age restricted about eight months after it first was published. Now that never happened to me. Now I can't confirm if this is true, but I was told by someone that I know for a fact works there that that is only done with like manually . Like someone has kind of gone right, a,gerict dist that and that just for me it was kind of the final story. And I was like, right, I'm sick of losing money on this. I was prepared to do it if people could see it , but when they can't even see it, it just falls off and they 're like, right, I'm done, you know, like I'm done with docs. So we haven't made a dock for about well we had two go out actually. We did one Sedna prison in Syria Lebanon one, but we haven't really made a proper dock for about two or three years because of this and to be honest just really is stopped us. Luckily through away days I found unfortunately a way to get through it. I was always very against self censoring, but you know, I've accepted it now. So we are going to start doing docs again. I'm just going to have to put them out very heavily censored. Yeah , that I was going to ask that like, what's your response to that? And initially your response was sort of, well, fuck you, I'm going to keep making this. And then and then it just seems the YouTube response got so aggressive that you came to the conclusion , correct me if I'm wrong, that if we want to get anything out, we have to adapt what we put out unfortunately because like otherwise what's gonna happen ? Exactly. And I think I was a lot younger and more idealistic at the time. I was like, I'm not going to bow to it. And it's like, you know , we live in hell, we got to dance in hell, you know, like I was like, you know, ultimately it was like, that's my ego almost like I shouldn't have to it.' Ands like, well, the whole world has to, you know, I personally don't feel that the West is any less authoritarian than our so called enemies. It's just done in a different way. I mean, it is, you know, physically perhaps, but especially in England we',re feeling it so heavily. Like it's outrageous. Like I went to Nando's the other day and it's says you're not allowed more than one glass of Coke and it literally says on the label it's government mandated . There's a little sign? Oh my gosh.. Yeah Yeah, yeah, government mandate. So I had my little, you know, one government mandated Coca Cola and you know, people might find that funny, but the real implications behind that is so dark, you know? And we're just seeing it everywhere and I was like , you know what? It's Sink or Swim. So yeah, now I tried it with the Way days and it's worked. You know, we actually have our own completely independent website where you can watch them uncensored and it did the amount of sign ups were unbelievable completely for free by the way. Like no one's no one's paying for the AWAY stuff, but the signups were like thousands. And I really think five years ago that wouldn't have happened. I feel like almost the censorship has created a cottage industry for people that are against it. So I've realized that I'm going to have to play along with it. And so we have some stuff coming out for popular front soon and I'm just going to have to put the uncensored stuff on our Patreon . But we've had problems with Patreon and then you also can't put four K on Patreon, but you know, we'll find it, we'll find a way. Yeah, we'll get to Patreon in a second though. I was just going to bring up the Away Days website . So you just uploaded the docs basically to the site like is there a video embedded in there or does it just let you upload video just like straight into the CMS? So we bought a great friend of us Ilias he's an absolute wizard man based built us a website and yeah, we got service space and he even worked out a way to make it really cheap and we can still stream four K like twenty five frames per second . So yeah, we own it completely, right? So we have it all so even then like Vimeo can't take it from us. You know, Vimeo was it's there now. You can't censor it unless the servers get blown up or whatever, you know, it's there. So I did it that way because I just I just realized like to really know it's not getting tampered with we have to be the baseline to upload it. You know, and certainly me and Elias were talking about actually trying to make some kind of platform together to do that for other reporters, you know, but it would unfortunately have to be exclusive and elitist in a way because you couldn't just do it for everybody because of how expensive would be for server costs. But I don't know, it's something we'll look at. But yeah, it's I think unfortunately that was the only option for us. So ironically , when I first started doing anything with editing and films and that it was literally when I was about twelve years old filming on my granddad's like digital camera, just me and my mates just skateboarding, like fighting, like breaking, you know, like nonsense stuff and editing it in Windows Movie Maker. And at that time the only way to put it online or show your friends was to upload it. I think it was like Angel Fire or something like that at the time. And now ironically in twenty twenty six, I kind of have to do the same thing again because of all the platforms have become so difficult to not be censored on. And look, I don't make anything that outrageous. I'm not doing like hard line political commentary. I'm not talking like violence is good. Like which a lot of very big streamers are, you know, and because they're so big they don't get tackled. And that's the problem because we are like, we're not big, we're not small. We're kind of like there . It's like, you know, we're kind of if we do get vanished, people notice but we're not big enough to not get vanished, you know? And I do think that's a big problem. The favoritism within those streaming platforms and all the multimedia world. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. Like your size is great and impressive, but then you get to a certain point where it almost works against you because you're not obviously a CNN or something, where you can appeal and have contacts on YouTube or whatever. And you're not a rando who like nobody's going to pay attention to. You're in that middle ground where shit we're actually going to get like the worst parts of the platforms potentially . Yeah, because if you do get taken down, you need your channel back. So say you have like five subs, you go, whatever, man. Like I'll just start another one. You can't do that. If you know, I think we got nearly two hundred thousand subs on our popular front YouTube . thirty five thousand on Weddays, I think twelve on my own, I can't just go Oh Start again. You know, it's just not going to happen, you know, that's a long time to build that stuff up . And you know, we're not channel five. We're not Hasan Paika, we're not, you know, whatever the right wing equivalent is. So yeah, we're in a weird space where we can 't just start again, but we also then can't really get the, you know, get the attention. Luckily we've we've been, you know, decent enough and work with enough people that do have that level neither of those two actually helped us. But Tommy G, for exam ple, randomly like helped us get our monetization issues fixed through YouTube . And that is really messed up that the way we have to get these problems fixed is to appeal to bigger creators that can say, hey, we'll help you out. And God, I appreciate them so much, you know, like big shout out to them, not the ones that completely ignored us after we helped them, but the ones that did . And it's just like this is absurd. You know, this really is absurd. And man, I thought we were jumping through hoops at the start. Like it's so bad now and it's very difficult. And now you've got like the new digital ID and VPN's and all these issues now, what's going to happen? I don't know, you know, I'm quite worried about that. We have viewers all over the world. We have viewers in like restrictive parts of the world that they have to get their VPN just to watch our docs. If we're going to be going to be taken off for like, you know, like having an anti Israel stance or an anti Russia stance, you know, who knows? I mean, I didn't think we'd have facial recognition without anybody voting for it. But here we are. So it's a it's a little bit of a worry, you know, and I just don't know how to tackle it, but we do keep finding ways to do it, but it's really, as you know, it's an extra job on top of your job. It becomes like more than fifty percent sometimes. Way more. Way more . Oh, my job is now. I have to figure out distribution rather than making journalism. And sometimes when I'm doing that and I'm focused more, and I know I've learned to enjoy the business part because I think if I didn't learn to do that , I mean, I'd be depressed, right? Like I've learned to embrace it and I actually do genuinely enjoy it now. But there's a limit to like, man, I just want to do some journalism. And I think everybody at four or four feels out as well. You mentioned Patreon , what happened with them then? Because this is now not just about the distribution, this is fucking with your money. Yeah. So I mean, I don't want to go too hard at Patreon because they have been good to us, but they have also been bad to us in a sense where like all of a sudden we'll get all of our funds frozen, right? So this happened very recently that we're just like, Hey, we need to check out your funds. Well, actually they didn't. Firstly, there was nothing. There was just nothing that we couldn't get the money. I, you know, out it comes . And you know, I have like people relying on me not when I was a team. It's not just me at all. So I got to pay people now. Like so much, you know, one of our guys in Romania , you know, in a very impoverished area and relies on, you know, he does great work for us. He's amazing, but you know, there's no industry for him, what he's good at where he is. So he's pretty much reliant on us. And I'm just terrified. I'm like, oh my God, like, you know, so it was fine. I paid out my own money and whatever, but it's one of these ones where all of a sudden your money just goes and it just vanished into the ether. Like it was nowhere. It didn't come through. There was no message, there was nothing. So I withdraw my money and it vanishes . And there's just, I mean, to this day, there is still no live chat on Patreon , right for help. It's just insufferable. The back ends, I mean, I'm sure you've seen it. It's a disaster. I'll be honest. Every new update, it's buggy. It's confusing. It's like, oh, you need help with this. Yeah, click it. Oh, here's fifty articles, you know, and it's just like this is madness and long story short eventually after I think two weeks and me just sending constant emails luckily someone I know who has money offered to give us like lawyers for free if it never came back. And I was like, thank God. And I said, you know, emailed them like, look, we're going to have to do this illegal thing. And all of a sudden, it just all came back and there was nothing. And eventually, all the retroactive emails come through, what's the problem? And it's like, man , this is not good, you know, this really is not good. And it's not like, oh, big poor me and with my independent journalism. No, it's just wrong. Like, you know, like if you're doing this independently or whatever , you shouldn't be accepting one day's pay late, you know? If you don't get paid in a normal job, you don't come back to work the next day or the next day . Well, Vice had an issue paying some freelancers but you know as do a bunch of other outlets, but yes, you know yeah when I first started working there I never forget I was paid seventy eight weeks late in a row. But yes you're right with a salary you don',t just rock up the next day you're like, what the hell? Yeah. Yeah . You know, or if and if you go to your manager and they just don't tell you anything and you're just silent, you'd be like, right, I'm out, you know? Like, and I've always said this freelancers, unfortunately, we can't live like this, but we, I mean, you know, we'rependent inde ess butenti weally're fre elance on a way. And it's like freelancers like you shouldn't be paid one minute late ever, not once. Once is unacceptable. One minute late is unacceptable. I don't care. It's not fair because the people at the top are not getting paid late. You know what I'm saying? And you know, it wasn't like Patreons struggling. It's for some reason we got hit with this thing and for whatever reason they don't have the adequate customer, you know, service to help you. And I just think that's it's just, I don't know, man. I think it's become almost acceptable now. I noticed it with YouTube, good luck speaking to anyone at YouTube, you know, it's so difficult, you know? There's this thing now where they just expect like yeah, we don't really have to get back to you. We have no obligation. You know, you just talk to an AI chat bot or an email like nobody helps. And it's just beyond it's so bad . I think the bare minimum you should at least be like, well, the people that literally make us money, you know, that they take the percentage of. We should probably get back to them if everything goes wrong, you know? Ironically, the only people that have ever got back to us is Twitter, like in a timely fashion and really tried to help us . And we had a very minor issues with them. Like shadow banning or what was it We got banned once. Like randomly I got banned. Me and this lad were like having a joke and I said, Yeah, come and meet me after school and we'll have a fight. You know, like we're messing around, like banned her. And I got banned for that. And I was like, What the hell? And you know, eventually they're like, I was so sorry like we sought it out. And I was like, oh, thanks. A guy from Bellingat actually helped me, you know, put a lot of tweets on and it was great. Nick, he's brilliant. But yeah, it was it's just crazy now that you kind of you can just make all these companies money and make the you make the platforms what they are, right? Without which users, Patreon is nothing and they just have no obligation to get back to you. You know, I'm sure it's illegal part of the time. I'm sure there's like trade and standard laws where you have to get back to people in timely manners, but yeah, it's just madness. And I think that's just it's going to get worse and worse with AI. You know, like half the time you now just end up talking to a chat bot and then it's like here's a link to the problem that isn't the one you told me about . And yeah, I just pray it doesn't happen again. Constantly on eggshells, you know, constantly worried that the rug is going to get pulled at any moment. Yeah, that's definitely the feeling . And I mean, just on the AI thing, I mean, Jason just reported that you know, the AI is so bad for the customer support things that hackers can then use it to take over people's accounts because they just trick the AI Instagram. Yeah, yeah, Instagram the other day, everybody's losing their accounts. Like crazy . So I think just my last question is like as you as an independent journalist , what sort of tools or platforms would you want ? Like what would you want there to exist for you to better do your job? Is it just improvements to the current ones? Is it something different? Like what would you want? Yeah, I mean basically the ones we have and just the people that own them and run them stop children, you know, like it's infantilization . You know, we can't post up a war report without blurring certain things because and I'm not talking pure gore. I'm not even, like, you know, like, we need to blur the end of like a gunfire in one. You know, like this nonsense infantilization , that has to stop. It won't stop because I understand the only real I mean people say they care about people and it's because of their it's nothing to do that it's advertising, right? But advertising is emphantalized. Advertising needs to grow up. I mean, go to the nineties. When I started away days, I was doing loads of research into like my favorite period of TV like mid two thousands. The adverts were absolutely wild and brightly so because we're adults. You know what I mean? But someone might see it and you know, they might feel a certain way . what So's? part That of being an adult. And I don't even mean it in this like oh anti woke thing. That's all dead. I don't mean that. Who cares? I'm just saying like stop treating everybody like a child. No one asks for this. Nobody wants it. And the constant pearl clutching is literally leading to censorship. There's no other reason this is all getting censored other than it helps these companies make money due to the sensitivities of advertising. Do you think the CEO of YouTube cares what goes out. If he did, he would stop like AI slop, he would stop the absolute trash of like Mr. Beast and that because it's scrambling children's brains. He doesn't care. He cares about the bottom line and that's fine , but unfortunately , treating everything like a nanny state has led to really serious censorship. And well, it depends who you are. Like for example, if your Hassan Pika or the other side Tim Pool too degenerate in my opinion , you can make a load of money, you can say whatever you want, you can incite violence , and you can just still make the money because it makes them a lot of money, right? But if you're midway as most people are, you're kind of at the mercy of them, you know, some random AI or some random guy deciding if it's worth them unbanning you because it will make the money or not, or it will keep the advertisers happy. And all I want is the same platforms to just chill out basically, you know, like I would love I would love a anti censorship kind of YouTube alternative, but the pure amount of service space is just never going to happen, you know? Like, I mean, you got rumble, but again, when you when you when you run on like no censorship, it just becomes right wing crap. Well, it becomes something else anyway, right? Yeah, like Rumble is like a right wing cesspool they've taken that idea , but they've kind of done it in the other direction, right? It's like, No, that's not what we mean. It's annoying. I think all you need to do is just go, look, this is a platform. We're going to be adults and that's it. You know, Nosta feels like that, you know, and it's just like I think stop it. But honestly, other than that, it's fine. I just think they need to leave the tools alone a little bit and fix the back end on Patreon because it's chaos. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I'll leave it there, Jake. Thank you so much for joining us. People listen ing, check out popular front of the way days. I'll put the links in the show notes for thank you so much, Jake, really, really, appreciate it. Cheers back. Appreciate it. Sinape . As a reminder, Foraf Media is journalist, founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to ForeaforMedia and directly support our work, please go to fourafmedia.co . You'll get unlimited access to our schools and an ad free version of this podcast , you'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcaff. 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