Please Pay for Your News
goel.io
Please Pay for Your News
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Re: Please Pay for Your News
#2If a business has to beg customers to pay, maybe they should step back and re-evaluate the value that they are purporting to offer and the methods with which they are offering it.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#3The thing about paid news is that they're offering a "premium" product, but that product has notable omissions. You know what I'd expect from news that you have to pay for? A bibliography. Something like (an idealized version of) Wikipedia, with a list of references included somewhere, each scoped to a particular claim—even if a reference just amounts to original research conducted by the news org. E.g. Interview with Terrance Bodwell, 2020 May 17.
It's almost like the raw deal you get with most commercial software. Consider the case where you have some open source thing that tends to be both free (as in price) and you get the source code to it. Now, someone is offering a premium alternative. What do you get for you money? In most cases, you actually have to give up on being able to look at the source.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#4I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque news source)
My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues:
1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased as you pick which facts and how to present them
2. Many news sources have different editors and journalist with a wide swathe of opinions that it's hard to trust one news source completely based off of reading just a few articles.
3. Picking one news source makes it likely to have confirmation bias, which is something I want to avoid.
Usually I stick with Wikipedia and its references for each subject and try to synthesize all sides of an issue. Or I pick specific writers who I've seen with a good track record that really try to be objective even with they are giving opinion pieces (Gwern is often my goto for a lot of topics)
So really I don't have a good answer for this, I would love other people's thoughts and other sources of good news or systems for finding good news
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#5I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque news source) My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues: 1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased…
Unbiased news does not exist. To get a good appreciation for the real "ground truth", one must accept bias exists and seek several opinions on a given issue, from different outlets or sources.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#6The thing about paid news is that they're offering a "premium" product, but that product has notable omissions. You know what I'd expect from news that you have to pay for? A bibliography. Something like (an idealized version of) Wikipedia, with a list of references included somewhere, each scoped to a particular claim—even if a reference just amounts to original research conducted by the news org. E.g. Interview wit…
Not to mention they still show me ads if I pay, which means I'm now paying them for the privilege of having ads I don't want shoved into my face and paying for the privilege of being tracked.
No thanks.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#7News is public knowledge. What you pay is the opinions of the news reporters. I personally have no interest in paying for politically skewed opinions of a pol-sci grad of few years ago. That is why I will never ever subscribe or read any newspaper in print or online. When I acidentally click on a link which takes me to NY Times or LA times or Atlantic titled website, I immediately close it without even perusing the first few lines of content, because I know it will be a political writing, not objective news.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#8I don't mind paying for news, but almost all news websites would keep track of what I read if I do that, and it's easy to figure out a person's political biases from their reading habits.
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#9I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque news source) My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues: 1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased…
> My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources.
Non-biased news never existed and will never exist as objective truth never existed.
However that doesn't mean that all new is necessarily "partisan."
Re: Please Pay for Your News
#10I'm paying for news. It's mandatory to do it in Germany and I'm really grateful for that. Especially in times like we live in today. It's a great basis for my daily and necessary dose of news. All those extras like good documentaries on media portals are bonus and only hindered by the private media restricting unlimited availability of those materials.
Everything beyond that has pretty much grown into either a quite expansive special I don't see a justification to pay for, things that everybody else already has and therefore is free or sources that does not offer a way to make a single time donation I'd love to do to reward a good or interesting article.
I'll not subscribe.