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Comment by Lxr | Hacker News Reader

This has probably been said before, but I feel the decline of quality reporting and rise of clickbait is largely due to the SV business model of "make everything free and support it via advertising". The only thing that matters in this model is engagement, therefore reporters and publishers optimize for engagement only, and clickbait is the natural consequence.

I am not quite sure why we can't operate like the rest of the world and charge for services - as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers.

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" as a user, I would always rather pay than have my data sold to advertisers."

Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through.

Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else.

Arguably, some news outfits were designed as profit making entities, and 'news' was just a vehicle to that profit. CNN is a relatively latecomer in the news world, and because they were formed primarily as a cable news channel ... they went about their business very differently that more classical print houses.

One thing we don't talk about enough: 'information consumption habits'.

People checked out the news every day to keep up. Now - they can read FB/Instagram and keep up with things that are possibly more important to them in their lives. So - the new social opportunity is literally grabbing 'waking hours' from regular news sites. Bloggers - good or bad - can report on events in some cases somewhat reliably - and so there are other outlets.

If you live in Toronto, you used to buy the 'Toronto Star' or 'Globe and Mail'. Now you can read NYT, Guardian, Washington Post - so there's a degree of consolidation as well.

Sadly, it's a mess and I hope someone can figure it out :)

>Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through. Only entities with a highly educated and conscientious readership can get away with firewalls: FT, WSJ, NYT - and not much else.

So maybe the problem is not bad news reporting, but the scarcity of highly educated and/or conscientious readership?

That is, maybe we should fix the education and the citizenry -- else people won't make much out of well written news anyway, if not for anything else, because they wont be able to evaluate them...

Sagan's warning in "The Demon-Haunted World"[1]:

    I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time --
    when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all
    the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome
    technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing
    the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the
    ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;
    when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our
    critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good
    and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition
    and darkness...

Until the public has a "baloney detection kit"[2] (and uses it regularly), trying to convince them to follow "The Truth" instead of the latest scam or wishful thinking is a waste of time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

[2] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k...

Fair point. But as a thought experiment, why can't I go down to the supermarket and pick up free packets of rice by the same logic? I'm engaged when I'm walking around the shop and as I'm reading the packet; there's plenty of opportunity for advertising. Rice costs money to grow, quality reporting costs money to produce, what's the difference?

The difference is that the value of one instance of ad engagement (yours) is lower than the cost of a packet of rice. But the value of thousands of engagements (number of readers) is higher than the cost of producing an article.

Distributing articles over the internet scales better than distributing rice packets through stores.

> Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through.

Because i suspect what is wanted is not a subscription but "for the day" payment, much like with a physical newspaper or magazine.

but most newspapers have adopted a more "blog" or TV news like approach, with new articles rolling in constantly rather than having a daily packet ala what you get with a print edition.

Never mind the hassle and worry about leaked/hacked credit card data.

>> Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through.

This shows that the average "information consumer" considers the so called "news" worthless. Action speaks louder than words.

The average "information consumer" considers his/her own private data also worthless, otherwise would not sell it for free eg. for worthless goods.

Now you can get the news from many different sources. That's probably a blessing if you are capable of critical thought and want to invest a minimal of effort to do some fact-checking and to get the big picture.

If you can't or don't want, I'd say the situation is more grim than before when people had one or a few somewhat neutral established sources of news such as the main newspapers or evening news on television. People get to pick what to believe and enforce their own little bubbles of reality.

So it might indeed come down to how educated and critical people are whether this ubiquitous news trend turns out to be an improvement or more harmful. I'd say that right now, in the West – where traditional media on the whole was at least somewhat neutral – it's not looking great. But in less democratic places where the media is state-owned, alternative sources of news might have a positive impact.

I pay around $10/mo for a music subscription, $10/mo for a video subscription. I'd also be happy to pay $10/mo for a news subscription, but then I need to get more than one publication, like my all-access music subscription.

The NY Times alone is $15/mo, WaPo is another $10, local news - $10, the Economist is $15/mo, the WSJ is something like $30/mo, FT also $30/mo

If I were to pay my way through all the paywalls I see in a month, I'd probably be paying over $100/mo for news alone!

What if it worked more like a utility? Where you have one sort of provider who pays everyone, and then bills you monthly based on usage? $0.01 per minute on YouTube, $0.05 per thousand words on NYT, etc. (Something obviously superior to advertising). I guess it's still a click bait problem at that point. But I'm sure a site like HN could ask for volumes more than what reddit could ask for.

And what if something like the Bitcoin micropayment network made this possible in a decentralized way?

> Most people would say this. But then when it comes time to get out their credit card and buy a subscription - they don't actually follow through.

Because the price is too high. Ads pay $1/thousand impressions. Subscriptions go for around $10/month. Convert to the same units, and it'd be something like $10/hundred impressions, or 100x the price.

The numbers are, of course, far from exact, but correct in terms of order of magnitude.

Bring the price down. Use micro payments, use bundling, use yearly subscriptions. At these prices, ads are the best user proposition and there'll be no uptake from subscriptions.

The problem is what to pay for and how. The WSJ may aggressively wish I were a paying subscriber, but I only read a handful of their articles, so that's never going to happen. I get news from all over the Internet, often because it gets posted here. Microtransactions might work, but have never taken off.

I would happily pay for an all-you-can-eat, ad-free subscription model, just as I'm happy to pay for Spotify. But it has to cover all the content I actually read, which in effect means hundreds of tiny specialist blogs and major publications like WSJ.

Unfortunately such a subscription model doesn't exist. And very few businesses are in a position to create it. Perhaps Google could, by offering a no-ads subscription across their adwords networ. They are unlikely to ever offer this though, because it would cannabalise their existing, highly profitable ad business. Hardly anyone else would have the necessary traction to make it work.

> Perhaps Google could, by offering a no-ads subscription across their adwords networ. They are unlikely to ever offer this though, because it would cannabalise their existing, highly profitable ad business. Hardly anyone else would have the necessary traction to make it work.

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

I am very surprised that this exists at all and I'll be even more surprised if it is successful. It seems like, to make it work, they would need to give more than the vague promise of fewer ads and actually require exclusivity for publishers in the programme.

After all, Google ads tend to be among the least obnoxious, so if I were to pay for no ads (on the basis that I simply don't want to see ads and not because of a greater societal benefit of removing them as a perverse incentive) then I would want a very clear contract that says for X group of websites, I will get no ads and they will get revenue from my browsing. I don't want there to exist some group Y that still gets revenue from my subscriptions, even though they continue to show ads anyway. In that case the subscription is unfit for purpose; it might as well be called a donation instead.

It's also possible that Google intends to play both sides and offer higher-priced, high-priority ads that are always shown. It could just be the AdBlock mess all over again, which is the trouble with having conflicting interests.

Back a long time ago, the primary way to get information was to go to the library. There were draw backs and limitation for the consumer, and of course publishers offered an alternative like book clubs where users paid a set amount in order to have a limited number of books delivered home without the restrictions of library books. Lets make a guess and say that 6-8% of library visitors found this as acceptable. The rest did not pay for all their reading except through taxes that gave very limited compensation to authors per reader.

Then we have radio for music. At one time in history, this was the main method for people to access music. Radio has some clear draw backs and limitation for the consumer, and record labels offered an alternative where consumer could buy CD's with a limited number of songs without the restriction that radio has. Let again guess that about 6-8% of consumer accepted this deal, while everyone else continued to listen to music for free and paid by taxes/advertisement that gave very limited compensation to musicians that only could guess the number of listeners.

Then we had TV for films. At one time in history, this was the main method for people to access movies, but at some heavy limitations. Rental services offered an alternative for a limited number of films without the restrictions of TV. Let again guess that about 6-8% of consumer accepted this deal, while everyone else continued to listen to watch movies for free and paid by taxes/advertisement that gave very limited compensation to movie producers that only could estimate the number of watcher.

And then we have the Internet that has everything from text, to sound, to audio-visual, using both models. Let me guess that its going to be about 6-8% paying customer. Unless we expect the media budget per family to increase by 10x in average, I have some doubt that there is a good plan on how to get such increase in spending.

(Taxes, as in state owned Library/Radio/TV. Sweden have a tax-but-not-tax on TV).

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