For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes • Hacker News Board

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#131

Post by Pinatubo » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 12:26 AM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #76

plg wrote: post #28

The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market. Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements? PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue. PPS I feel the same way ab…

I was a subscriber for 4 years and I can confirm that the Economist is crap. It looks good compared to other choices like 'Times' or 'Newsweek' which are totally unreadable. * It has totally absurd double-standards: Russia, Iran, China and their puppets (e.g. Syria and so forth) are 'bad' and 'evil'. US, EU and the UK stand for 'justice and peace in the world'. If your world-view is so naive, then you deserve the eco…

> I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally.

Bill Emmott resigned as editor in February 2006.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#132

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 12:44 AM UTC

eevilspock wrote: post #127

dredmorbius wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayment solutions don't work, won't work, and will never work. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

That's been said of a lot of things. We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking. Think out of the box.

Nick's logic (which I'd arrived at independently, though years later) is solid. He's known for some fairly impressive ideas, some of which I disagree with.

Publishing, traditionally, has worked through integrated purchasing rather than dis-integrating purchasing. Magazines, newspapers, books, subscriptions, broadcast advertising (bundled payments through advertisers rather than subscribers). Music syndication. For numerous reasons.

Individually assessing the purchase validity of ever smaller quantities of content simply doesn't pan out. Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns, rather more so.

Micropayments are the media payment plan of the future, and always will be.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#133

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 12:45 AM UTC

fweespeech wrote: post #123

dredmorbius wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist does in fact have a marked and explicit editorial mission to promote free trade principles, set forth in their Prospectus[1], specifically, that "ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agricu…

There is a world of difference between a group with the integrity to state its biases publicly and one that hides them in a dozen puppet papers.

Well, yes, but that wasn't my argument.

It also doesn't address any unstated biases The Economist Group might have.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#134

Post by tzs » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 1:17 AM UTC

jaskerr wrote: post #130

tzs wrote: post #59

Speaking of The Economist, is anyone else getting a ridiculous amount of third party spam pushing The Economist subscriptions? I'm getting several a day, typically from domains in the new TLDs, such as .date, .science, .faith, and .review. The domain names match the IP addresses, have SPF records that check out, and they body doesn't have any of the usual things that make it look like spam, and so Spamassassin is mar…

Be sure to check the origin/return address before you blame the Economist. I receive multiple Economist spam emails a day, and none of them are from @economist.com, or a marketing firm. The TLDs alone give them away: @ .faith, @ .date, and so on. The links in the emails also go to the odd TLDs or to clearly bogus domains.

I'm not blaming The Economist. I'm blaming some third party member of their affiliate program. (Do affiliate programs ever not end up with some affiliate spamming?)

The links in the emails go to the odd TLDs, where they then redirect a few times ending up at The Economist with what appears to be affiliate tracking information in the URL, which I presume is so that the spamming affiliate will get paid if I subscribe at that point.

If I can figure out what email address @economist.com to report this to I'll send them a sample of one of the mails and the affiliate tagging information and hopefully they'll kick that affiliate out of their program.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#135

Post by eevilspock » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 2:02 AM UTC

sysk wrote: post #128

eevilspock wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay. We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads. The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Fa…

> The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN…

With all due respect I don't think you have been paying attention as much as I. Anti-ad sentiment on HN as well as elsewhere has only been on the rise in the past few months. But all you have to do is go back in my comment history a ways and you can see all the flack I get, though you won't see all the down-votes I got (a lot!).

Bashing ads is just starting to get hip, just as bashing Flash only got hip relatively recently, after an earlier period where Apple got bashed by many simply for being ahead of the mainstream.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#136

Post by eevilspock » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #132

eevilspock wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been said of a lot of things. We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking. Think out of the box.

Nick's logic (which I'd arrived at independently, though years later) is solid. He's known for some fairly impressive ideas, some of which I disagree with. Publishing, traditionally, has worked through integrated purchasing rather than dis-integrating purchasing. Magazines, newspapers, books, subscriptions, broadcast advertising (bundled payments through advertisers rather than subscribers). Music syndication. For nu…

1. Nick wrote this in 1999 and he's been proven wrong. For example when Apple proposed selling music tracks for 99¢ and he probably would have used this very argument and pooh-poohed them along with everyone else.

2. His arguments are one of an anal accountant. Do you know what fraction of the population even reviews their monthly credit card statement, their long distance phone charges, whether or not their mobile data plan minutes are being counted accurately, or whether their iTunes charges matches the number of songs they download exactly? A very small fraction. Do we need to? No, not all of us. We can trust that if a vendor violates trust and commits fraud, someone will catch it and they will suffer a class-action lawsuit, as does actually happen.

3. "Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns" can work great if the amount I pay per month is fixed, and that fixed payment is apportioned among the things I consumed in a way that rewards quality. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960. This is just a simple idea by me, an amateur.

Back to "impossibles":

- If before Wikipedia existed, someone proposed to create an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could anonymously edit, that it be funded by donations and that it become the encyclopedia that most people refer to, nearly 100% of us would have rolled on the floor and laughed out loud.

- If before it existed someone described a magical currency with the properties of what we now call Bitcoin, most would have said, "yeah right".

- If before asymmetric public-private key encryption was invented, someone said we needed a way to communicate where one side could decrypt something sent by the other but not be able to do the reverse and thereby pose as the other, most would have said, "good luck."

Please, please stop speaking in absolutes. It comes off as rather arrogant and foolish rhetoric.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#137

Post by bduerst » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 2:41 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #86

potatoman2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with News Corp?

The most recent and most serious scandal involving News Corporation was 2011 phone hacking scandal ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_News_Corporation_scandals ). Gives you an idea of what sort of scumbags run that mega-conglomerate.

That's the most recent? Just in July there were supposedly part of a giant plan with the MPAA to slander Google to manipulate stock prices. It's amazing anyone takes NewsCorp seriously.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/72607/20150731/mpaa-secret...

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#138

Post by techbio » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 3:38 AM UTC

Marazan wrote: post #113

gcv wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't catch The Economist's biases on a cursory reading of one issue, that's on you. Simply skimming one of the leader opinion pieces and comparing it to, e.g., a Krugman column, should tell you that the authors would come to blows. Besides, what is an "orthodox" position? Whose?

I'm not talking about their overall world view I'm talking about their "Coffee growing in Guatamala" or "Cement production in the far east" articles - the ones where they are providing information on a relatively obscure subject. The articles present very matter of fact tones when in reality they are often reporting on one side of genuinely contraversial issues.

I prefer my reading to ignore the "teach the controversy" camp.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#139

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 3:52 AM UTC

eevilspock wrote: post #135

sysk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN…

With all due respect I don't think you have been paying attention as much as I. Anti-ad sentiment on HN as well as elsewhere has only been on the rise in the past few months. But all you have to do is go back in my comment history a ways and you can see all the flack I get, though you won't see all the down-votes I got (a lot!). Bashing ads is just starting to get hip, just as bashing Flash only got hip relatively re…

The HN type of audience has been bashing Flash pretty aggressively for at least 15 years, certainly it was a common refrain that could be relied on for easy upvotes back in Slashdot's heyday.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#140

Post by setpatchaddress » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 4:56 AM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #76

plg wrote: post #28

The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market. Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements? PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue. PPS I feel the same way ab…

I was a subscriber for 4 years and I can confirm that the Economist is crap. It looks good compared to other choices like 'Times' or 'Newsweek' which are totally unreadable. * It has totally absurd double-standards: Russia, Iran, China and their puppets (e.g. Syria and so forth) are 'bad' and 'evil'. US, EU and the UK stand for 'justice and peace in the world'. If your world-view is so naive, then you deserve the eco…

I recall it being far more balanced prior to the Bush administration. They had a viewpoint: pro-free trade, and generally pro-civil-rights. You could reasonably disagree with the pro-free trade stance.

Then, in the mid-naughts, I recall begin shocked as they started to run epic essays begging Karl Rove to attempt to rise above politics as usual, and about how Texas represented the future of the world. Completely off the rails.