71–80 of 246 posts
Mixed feelings about this. I hate paywalls because they inhibit sharing and conversation, but... if people don't pay for news, soon there won't be any reporters. People have to make a living somehow.
PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.
PSA: (National) Newspapers incite rage for clicks and revenue generation, and serve as a propagandizing arm for our beloved 3 letter agencies. Their services are essential for ensuring the success of our neoconservative war hawks in Washington to continue to fund their war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars while neglecting more pressing matters like our nation's crumbling infrastructure and completely unaf…
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I pay for NYT, but I can't subscribe to the paper of every article I want to read. I need some kind of group subscription for it to be feasible.
Ah, the NYT that helped justify the US invasion of Iraq based on falsehoods? That NYT? Edit: Explanation - the "I subscribe to the NYT" as a pat response to funding news sources puts far too much power in the NYT's hands, and they've proven to be less than trustworthy in the past.
PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.
You wouldn't bypass a car
Public transit is clearly the best kind of theft! /s
An article worth reading is worth buying.
How am I supposed to know beforehand if an article is worth reading? I ran into a lot of articles on HN which are behind a pay wall (I use this extension), but were not deeply interesting, therefore I left after one or two paragraphs. I can't imagine how much money I would've spent on nothing if I'd pay for every article I click on. Also, I believe the news outlets have a similar problem like video stream providers:…
An article worth reading is worth buying.
Amen. Good news is expensive. It takes a lots a lot of resources and trained professional's hours to make a well researched story. High quality investigative news outfits have real, positive impact on society. They root out corruption and help bring injustices to light. I figure most people on this site can afford to subscribe to a news source or two and probably should.
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Except the industry is stuck in 1995. You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article. It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.) [1] NYT digital cost
Not disagreeing that a new model is needed, but.. I'm not sure Netflix/Spotify is a good example. In order to access all the content I want, I have to have a zillion streaming accounts with monthly fees. The Netflix model in particular is indistinguishable from the existing pay news model, at least in this regard...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except the industry is stuck in 1995. You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article. It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.) [1] NYT digital cost
Totally agree. Micropayments have not worked because major news outlets won't use them. Technically it's a solved problem. See Coil for example: https://coil.com/
For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party.
The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want.
And then there's a chicken-egg problem of no sites using Coil, so no money in Coil, so no value for the user, thus no value for the content creator. Just like every micropayment attempt before Coil.
As engineers we like to think that everything is a technical problem. But the technical implementation of a micropayment solution is 0.0001% of the work.