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The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

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Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#271

Post by rsync »

tptacek wrote: post #201

Tangent: I'm not sure I can think of recent money I've spent better than a year-long Washington Post subscription. Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites --- many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that organizati…

"Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites"

I agree with this.

I would like to suggest that you extend this discovery from "daily" iterations with, as you suggest, WaPo/NYT/FT to "weekly" iterations with the London Review of Books[1]. Or the New Yorker. Both are very, very good.

Personally, I prefer reading LRB physically (with scotch) and the Kindle delivery of the New Yorker which I read with meals eaten out.

[1] LRB is about 1/3 editorial/commentary/journal and about 2/3 actual book reviews. The editorial/commentary is a very different flavor from any other media source I know of an is very interesting and refreshing. It's also quite progressive and left leaning which is interesting to me because I am not (so much).

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#272

Post by vonklaus »

gaius wrote: post #240
kofejnik wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a logical fallacy to assume that people who downloaded your work would have discovered it and actually paid for it if there was no free option a lot of artists would PAY to get millions of downloads/views

Let me know when you can pay rent or buy groceries with retweets.

it's unclear if you do not realize thousands of people make their living full-time as promoters on social media. They literally pay rent with money that was paid to them proportionate to their retweets. Or if this was hyperbole to underscore your disagreement with a freemium business model

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#273

Post by mynameisvlad »

todd3834 wrote: post #228
zeamaize wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell should I pay for poor journalism that is riddled with ads? There is a reason I subscribe to Netflix but not Hulu.

Hulu has an ad free plan

They really should have been more vocal in announcing its release. I find that a lot of people still believe the only available options are ad-supported.

I had only discovered it when I wanted to resubscribe for other reasons; I probably would have done it earlier if I had known the option was available.

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#274

Post by tptacek »

Klover wrote: post #269
tptacek wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I hadn't subscribed in the past: I figured it was pointless, because what I really needed was the gestalt from all the papers. Boy was that dumb of me. I'm sure I would benefit from having perspectives from the WSJ and NYT to pair with WaPo. But my previous state was having no newspaper at all to rely on, just free sites like (bleh) Slate and (unbelievably bad) cable news web sites like CNN. Addin…

>just free sites like (bleh) Slate and (unbelievably bad) cable news web sites like CNN. I feel genuinely sorry for you. I can't imagine reading that every single day. That's a lot of exposure to, quite frankly, a whole lot of clickbait. Don't NYT and WaPo have a limited amount of free pageviews per day? Come to think of it, there are millions of people in the world whose primary source of news is social media like F…

I didn't stop at Slate and CNN; they (along with Bloomberg View) were just my only "magazine" format daily reads. Obviously, I read important stories on NYT or WaPo.

But the point isn't that you can read the "important" stuff with a free pageviews. The point is that you can click your bookmark bar link for WaPo and just browse the whole site, which is an entirely different experience than just reading a couple stories from them over the course of the week in the process of drilling into a story that's trending on other sites.

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#275

Post by johnnyb9 »

freddyc wrote: post #242
douche wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it gives me great hope that quality news organizations have a future I hope that high quality news organizations do have a future, but the WaPo? I'm not sure that label fits.

Why do you say that? Their political coverage and some of their deep-dive investigative pieces have been top drawer IMO.

I think this article pretty much sums up how I feel about the Washington Post: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04/washpost-is-richly-rewar...

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#276

Post by mirimir »

sah2ed wrote: post #262
mirimir wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy to pay, under these conditions: 1) payment per article, at prices comparable to aggregate ad income; and 2) payments accepted via Bitcoin, or other methods which can be anonymized.

> 1) payment per article, at prices comparable to aggregate ad income; Unfortunately, this kind of micropayment will not work for most people and perhaps more importantly will lead to less revenue for the publisher. Clary Shirky has written about why micropayments [0] is the wrong model for consuming content more than a decade ago. [0] http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

Well, ads are currently placed through a micropayment system. And there's no reason that customers would need to make individual decisions, any more than advertisers do.

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#277

Post by imtringued »

stop_thief wrote: post #237
monochromatic wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I steal your car, I've deprived you of the use of your car. If I copy your program, have I deprived you of the use of your program? How is that a linguistic argument?

Because you're using an unreasonably narrow definition of theft that doesn't include intangibles.

Imagine there is a technology that could copy tangible goods such as cars. Now somebody makes a copy of your car. Your car was not stolen but you may not be happy with the fact that somebody now also has a copy of your personal belongings like a smartphone that was inside the car.

This is where copyright law comes into play which only allows copying the car only under your rules. If somebody doesn't follow the rules that doesn't mean they stole your car but it still means they should receive some form of punishment to prevent future copyright infringement.

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#278

Post by rsync »

CSMastermind wrote: post #224
tptacek wrote: post #201

Tangent: I'm not sure I can think of recent money I've spent better than a year-long Washington Post subscription. Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites --- many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that organizati…

The Wall St. Journal is the single highest quality news source I'm aware of.

"The Wall St. Journal is the single highest quality news source I'm aware of."

I prefer the NYT and think the reporting is better and broader - especially with regard to the fluffier sections like Sunday Styles, the Magazine, the Book Review and so on ... if I had to pick a single news source I think the A section of NYT would be my choice.

However, I have to say that I enjoy reading the Financial Times more because of their practice of condensing a story into a single page without a fold and without a jump to another page. They explore the story in more depth deeper in the paper, but you can read the front page headline column from start to finish without unfolding and page turning.

Also, the NYT has this habit of vastly over-backgrounding quotes ... a ten word quote will have 2-3 inches of comma-delimited background and qualifications and it just breaks the story and is hard to read.

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#279

Post by mynameisvlad »

bitexploder wrote: post #150
wslh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create a fake account.

It still helps them if it all aggregates under one account.

Then create a fake account every week. On a fresh VPN/Tor connection so it's not tied to your IP. Better use a different browser too so it's not fingerprinted [0]. Make sure you disable those sharing links and the JS that loads them in.

Let's be real, they get data about you in a million ways. It'll all be aggregated somehow, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did aggregate in other ways like IP/browser, and those sharing links definitely leave cookies behind.

[0]: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely

#280

Post by pitay »

dawnerd wrote: post #245
glenneroo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Experts Exchange was doing. Back in the days before Stack Overflow, EE was one of the hot places to go for answers to software engineering problems. It was a free site for many years, then one day they decided to require a subscription to read the answers. Google still indexed the question, so that you would open up a EE link, only to be greeted with "the answer requires a subscription". Google allowed th…

If I remember correctly EE had the real answers waaaaaay down on the page. They were banking on people not scrolling.

From memory you could scroll to get the results IF it detected you clicked on a google search result to get there, otherwise the answers were not displayed.
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