191–200 of 246 posts
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We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough .
How about a group subscription on Substack, distributed to the authors based on the log of the number of page views?
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You have been awarded 8 good boy points by the Ministry of Intellectual Property. Please collect your prize at the Ministry of Love. Bypassing a HTML element is not 'stealing', its reformatting remote data. They are sending the article in the reply to the request, and messing with the formatting. If they did not want you to read the full text, they would not allow an unauthenticated users to access the text. I always…
>empowering the powerful and cursing the weak. Property rights in particular protect small and independent creators who rely on the fact that people pay for their products. Large studious can generally eat the losses of piracy, independent developers cannot. This is why today they're forced to either two things. Build proprietary products that make theft impossible, or live on donations and capture only a fraction of…
Everything else is coercion. I do not subscribe to your flavor of authoritarian strong IP.
> We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.
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This is the “but she was wearing a low cut top” argument.
In a way these publishers are abusing a public service (search engines) to get a higher ranking, giving the illusion of publicly available content, but then breaking the promise. In practice for their personal private gain they are damaging the system for everyone else, which is much worse imho.
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Just because there’s a technical workaround doesn’t make it not stealing. If I neglect to lock my car and my stuff gets stolen, it’s still stealing. I might have been able to prevent it had I locked the car, but it’s still stealing.
By this definition, ad-blocking is stealing. Is using a technical workaround to hid HTML ok but using it reveal hidden HTML is not? Your car example is not a good analogy. Once you notice people stealing, you would make sure the door is locked. Just like these websites can restrict the content server-side.
At the end of the day you are stealing and looting not just from the company, but the everyday people who work for that company, who are just trying to make a living for themselves and their families, and no rationalization will change that.
And to the car analogy: Let's say I was stolen from, but I'm so lazy I still can't be bothered to lock my car. Or I leave it open for some other reason. This has zero effect on the morality of the thief stealing from my car. It just means I'm an easy target for stealing. Two completely separate things.
I will never understand people complaining about paywalls. Quality writing cost money and these writers need to support in one way or another. Ads are not effective because everyone runs adblock and ads are also suspect so the easiest way to is to directly charge for their work which everyone whines about while simultaneously whining about how low quality most writing is these days. I wonder why?
1) the price is too high for the content I consume. Often I will read a single article from a single well known publisher a couple times a month to a couple times a year.
2) I don’t know if I will find the content valuable until after I have read it. Headlines haven’t been of too much help especially lately where some quality content is under click-baity headlines; though sometimes the opposite is true or more often click-bait headlines do accurately reflect the quality of the content.
3) There is a lot of friction to pay even if the price did match my consumption model. And in addition to friction I have concerns with how my personal information might be used or resold; Creating an addressable audience via first party data is a tactic being pushed by advertisers and marketers.
So while I do agree with your evaluation I think the problem is a bit more nuanced (or maybe I’m just the minority).
Some have suggested a “spotify for news” which checks many of the above boxes but creates its own privacy concerns, may incentivize low quality content in the way ads do, add walled garden concerns, and may introduce fair compensation concerns.
An “open” solution, as hand wavy as that sounds, seems closer to ideal but as has been demonstrated time and again may not be competitive enough to “closed” solutions where winner takes all is in effect.
Just some thoughts.
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It seems like the current model isn't working too well. The more outlets clickbait the more they damage their brand. And people get a lot of news through Reddit and Twitter these days completely bypassing news outlets.
I don't know why people still think that. NYTimes is basically back to their glory days of revenue and profit, the FT is doing extremely well, etc etc. Non paywalled news outlets will be clickbait - they are 100% dependent on advertising revenue and need to get clicks. Paywalled sites generally aren't.
I used to pirate a lot of video games when I was young. Steam ( later epic ) entered India and started regional pricing and now I have pretty big collection on steam and epic ( free games ) Same thing with Movies and music. I made a huge offline collection worth 2-3TBs before I just had to throw it all away because everything was available on spotify, Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, Amazon Prime. Their services are top-notc…
> “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” https://www.gamesradar.…
Maybe pick 1 or 2 newspapers you consider to be truthful to actually get a subscriptions for, besides using this addon. I get it, there are newspapers out there you really don't check out that often, and they have no free articles per month or "purchase this article", and paying 20 dollars for a subscription for 2 articles a month at 10 different newspapers is a little much. But the more people don't pay for news, th…