Subscription Hell

This is possibly the worst use of the term "pyramid scheme" I have ever seen used in print, and that's really saying something with how often it's abused nowadays.

  > We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users.
  > Plain text is easier to produce

So can we go back to plain text?

Actually is this even true? Take a newspaper like the Washington Post. Now I've seen All the President's Men, where two reporters spend days and weeks, driving and flying around the country, for just a few articles. I know Watergate was an usual amount of investigation, but I still would think the research and writing is the most expensive part of an article.

  > Today’s consumers [...] want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts,
  > graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format.

I smirked because I have JavaScript turned off. In fact I run my own little script that strips out all the CSS and starts over.

Of course a member of Hacker News is unusual, but I know my family members are the same way, always complaining about how complicated websites are. Maybe we're all just old fuddy duddies. But if it's the young who want all this fanciness, those are the same people who aren't going to pay more than 99 cents for a newspaper subscription.

I still think pretty websites should not be a huge expense. Hire a graphic designer to give you a framework, some stylesheets. Custom multimedia affairs for each article have always, always, always been annoying to me.

Sorry but nobody is forcing you to use sublime.

If they started charging just for use they wouldn't need neither an excuse nor a justification.

I really don't see your point.

If you could explain further why you think sublime would need an excuse for charging a monthly fee I would really appreciate.

> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. Those features have to be paid somehow, begetting us the advertising and subscription models we see today.

It was kindof upsetting to read this after having switched the article into Firefox's reader mode, because the page was completely unusable.

If you want to talk about consumers' wallets not existing in a vacuum: if your 3.5 KB article is sending me 10 megs of crap, then your mobile users' carriers are charging them more than the advertizers are paying you.

There are some real challenges in figuring out how to fund journalism, but if bandwidth is one of them you're doing something very wrong.

> But then you point out that there is no viable micropayments platform. Doesn't seem like there's much to mention beyond "yup, still doesn't exist."

Sure there is: "Micropayments are fundamentally infeasible".

Which is to say, payments are trivial to do. There have been dozens and dozens of startups doing online payments in various schemes since the beginning of the internet. But the fraud problem is not solvable on that kind of scale. Batching payments such that you buy one "thing" for at least a few dollars gives some level of assurance that one human being looked at the transaction and that the seller gave enough thought to be sure it was worth selling as a unit.

That all falls apart when you get to "one article" scale. You want this to be a purchase that the user doesn't even thing about (because seriously if I have to stop and think whether I want to pay $0.13 to read an article the answer is "NO"). But without that promise of thought it becomes impossible to reasonably authenticate a transaction. Users will be absolutely flooded with fraud schemes tricking them into OKing these tiny things.

This is what killed ad-supported platforms too.