Hacker News Reader

Comment by magic5227 | Hacker News Reader

As it should.

Paywalls present a worse user experience than say Bloomberg.com which shows its content for free.

Bloomberg News is subsidized by the terminal business. It's free and public so terminal users can send non-payers links. I guess if you want your news funded entirely by a small group of people in the financial sector, that's fine. But for those of us grateful for the work the Wall Street Journal did to uncover e.g. the Theranos scandal, paying for good journalism is the way to go.

This isn't an assessment of content quality, it's of a user's experience.

All Google needs to do is optimize for things like time on page, CTRs, etc to see users abandoning those with paywalls and not those without to decide one is a better experience overall than another.

Bloomberg.com is great at giving you rubbish quickly. The WSJ is better at giving you good information for a fee. Depends on what you want to optimize for, I suppose.

Are you really going to argue that Bloomberg, the one which is able to make Bloomberg Terminal[1] a good value proposition, is worse in terms of quality of information than the Washington Post?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/solution/bloomberg-te...

> Are you really going to argue that Bloomberg, the one which is able to make Bloomberg Terminal[1] a good value proposition, is worse in terms of quality of information than the Washington Post?

No, because I don't read the Washington Post and I don't see why it's relevant.

But yes, I do claim that bloomberg.com is a poor source of news. Bloomberg.com is to the Bloomberg Terminal as the Amazon Fire Phone is to AWS. Sure, the same company makes both, but one is rubbish and the other is something professionals use all the time.

In my opinion, the best news sources I read regularly are ones I pay for directly, with content hidden behind a paywall. This kind of reporting and investigating costs money to produce and is worth paying money for (and not just advertising views).

This is a false dichotomy. Abandoning a website because of a paywall !== bad user experience. The UX can be fine, but the user may be poor. Many websites have restricted logins and perfectly acceptable UX.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com