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Comment by sna1l | Hacker News Reader

These clickbaity articles have become way more common on HN

These clickbaity articles have become way more common on the web. There's rarely anyone writing quality content for the sake of the content anymore. It's all just glorified hyperlink farming and ad impressions.

Well, if we get wsj links, half of HN complains. If we get links from decent websites that have adblocker-blockers, the other half complains.

I complain for both, so I believe you're double counting.

finally buckled down and got a WSJ subscription

I tried to be clever and use California's library system which has WSJ for free, because I thought "hey its 2017 library databases like ProQuest wouldn't still suck right"

well it was horrible like I just got jettisoned back onto Blackboard in the mid 2000s, so after that I just bought the WSJ subscription.

Luckily, my wife is in grad school. She set me up with WSJ and NYTimes till the end of 2018.

There's rarely anyone writing quality content for the sake of the content anymore.

That may be so, but let's place the blame accurately: the writer didn't submit the article to HN.

Why, it's as though those organizations that didn't resort to link farming and choking their page with ads went out of business because everybody wanted their journalists to work for free!

End users have been conditioned for two decades that everything online is free. The advertising industry wasn't pushed by end users to become more and more aggressive until ad blockers became viable and a must.

Nobody wanted journalists to work for free.

There is quality content out there, much of it for free. It's just hard to find, particularly via search engine.

The best quality content I find is almost always someones personal, non commercial writeup. often times this is something as simple as the comment section of a article, or their own blog.

They put no ads and do it because they care about the subject and care about their reputation so they make sure its not spamy.

I have alwasy hoped for a micropayment system I could use to reward this behavior.

Well...yeah. That's what pays.

(And this is why I subscribe to media that does support long-form journalism and kit out journalists with the tools--and the paychecks--necessary to make it happen. Subscribe as in pay-money-to-on-a-monthly-basis. It's the only way it survives.)

Writing "quality content" takes time. with adblockers the norm, good writers have been put out of business. It's like what Uber and co did to cab drivers.

Not sure I follow.

You are saying taxi drivers are "quality content", and Uber is low quality service/spamy. Pretty sure its the other way around.

(If you are looking only at the culture however they may actually both be closer together....)

Black car drivers were.

longform.org

Maybe a mod should change the link to the justice.gov post I linked to in the parent? I don't see any articles out there that add anything substantial.

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