I would pay $5/mo to use Twitter, but only if every other user paid the same amount and there were no ads.
I'm curious, what is it about Twitter that you'd pay for?
Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
61–70 of 83 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#62None of them. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of blogs and media sources I like, but at the end of the day I can get any information I want somewhere else for free. Heck, in many cases, the information I need is either paid for by taxes (the BBC) or provided by hobbyists for free anyway.
I'm not sure this is correct always. Sure you can get much of the information for free, but not any, as you mention. And even if you did, you'd be paying for it with your time, spending hours and days poring over data and separating facts from noise. For example: if you are an investor, can you get information on potential opportunities (stocks to buy or whatever) without having to spend money or a lot of time? What about real estate? If you or a loved one has a unusual medical condition and you're interested in knowing every recent development in the diagnosis, treatment etc of the condition, can you get it accurately and quickly for free?
Happy to be proven wrong, but I guess we'd be paying for good information/commentary/analysis etc one way or other - with time or money.
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#63There aren't many. HN is the closest, but the truth is that I'd not start out paying $5 a month for it: I'd have to have 3 months free to test, then .... maybe. I'd probably pay for Reuters, AP, or BBC. The thing with these is varied content or content I check on my own. The problem with most things bogs is that I don't get that much out of them. They are like newspapers or magazines: Might be OK every now and then,…
> and stops people from forcing their morals on me Those are almost certainly not their morals that they're including in the recipe, but rather their monetization strategy. Those brand-specific ingredients are likely examples of brand placement.
The brand specific ones are probably so. Simply listing "organic butter" isn't such a thing, and it happens quite often. I understand enough to just use the butter I have, but some folks truly aren't. (I once had someone tell me ibuprofen didn't work for them: they had to have Advil. Same stuff happens with cooking, even with ingredients mandated to be the same).
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, something feels impure about paying for knowledge, we should be pushing back on any kind of pay wall. That said, I'm really not sure what system should be put in place to pay for quality content.
Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner? Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.
Blogs are already convenient to access anywhere, anytime and in a timely manner. Its called RSS.
Not sure how $5/month would improve on that.
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#65Kottke.org. The best digest of the culture side of the Internet.
In case you didn't already know, kottke does already have a membership model: https://kottke.org/members/
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#66Is it bad if I'd say absolutely none? If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else.
> If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else. I'd double down on that, any site that has a free article limit (looking at you NY Times) I don't even bother with. Or any site that whines about running an ad blocker. True they need to make some cash to keep the lights on but I have never in my life bought something from seeing an online advertisement and don't really appreciate being tracked…
What are you willing to give for the information you receive?
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#67I would pay $5/month for Hacker News, Drudge Report, and reddit.com/r/all.
Well, https://skimfeed.com is free. Get yourself something nice with that $5 :)
This is nice, didn't know skimfeed.
I've been working on a news aggregator too, just released my first beta :-) http://aktu.io
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#68LWN.net. I don't read their articles often, but seeing what's on the forefront of the Linux project and associated work without combing through tons of commits is useful
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else. I'd double down on that, any site that has a free article limit (looking at you NY Times) I don't even bother with. Or any site that whines about running an ad blocker. True they need to make some cash to keep the lights on but I have never in my life bought something from seeing an online advertisement and don't really appreciate being tracked…
What are you willing to give for the information you receive?
That's actually quite the thought provoking question.
I think, since I'm so accustomed to getting information gratis and don't really have very much disposable income, if push came to shove I'd just give up on all non-free sources of information and find some other way to occupy my free time -- perhaps quit being lazy and work enough to upgrade my computer so I could get back into Blender development or something along those lines. It's much too easy to spend hours reading random articles or watching the youtubes instead of being productive "for society" and I have a bunch of half-finished projects scattered across my harddrives that could easily keep me entertained if I lost access to free content on the internet.
Re: Ask HN: Which blogs/newsletters would you be willing to pay $5/month for?
#70I read more blogs (single articles based on headlines of interest) than newsletters (digests that show up in my inbox). While I find many of them interesting and informative (krebs, schneier, ars, hn...) there's so much duplicated info around there isn't much I'd be willing to actually pay $60/year for.
Would rather do something like cryptocurrency micro-payments per actual article read to the end (or upvoted, clapped, etc) as opposed to spending a set amount of money per month for potentially unhelpful content or articles I don't get around to reading.
That would reward content creators for writing good material that actually gets read and the economy of scale would pay based on that mutual incentive. Such micropayments would also be a better metric than simple impressions and clicks.