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Comment by piracykills | Hacker News Reader

Is it bad if I'd say absolutely none? If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else.

> Is it bad if I'd say absolutely none?

If you're okay with ads or donate to journalistic non-profits, I think it's okay. Otherwise, it is unsustainable.

I've been blogging since 2004 with no real ads or affiliate revenue to speak of, and it's news to me that it's "unsustainable." But then, I guess it depends upon whether we mean "sustainable as in keeping me motivated to write," or if we mean, "financially sustainable as in keeping me in fresh sock garters and Camambert risotto."

I get maybe $500 a month from people buying my books, and another $20 a month in amazon affiliate revenues from links to other people's books. If I tried to live on this, I'd starve. But this is not unusual, and I suspect that I am making more money than most people who blog.

Let's be clear: It's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom bicycle frames. These are, by and large, terrible businesses from a venal point of view.

Most people are in it for the love, because writing scratches their own itch. It's an awful business to be in: Like pop music, it's mostly a few big winners scooping the lion's share of the revenues, with everyone else scraping by or having a day job to pay the rent.

I am ok with people paying me zero dollars, because I write for myself. If I tried to live off it, I'd have to make insane compromises, like putting out a new book every time a new language looked to become popular, or writing clickbait blog posts on a schedule. And even then, the odds are that I would just get by, and need to supplement that income with speaker's fees and consulting.

Writing for money is a questionable model for a vocation, and a terrible model for an avocation.

Writing for yourself is an excellent model for an avocation, but unsustainable as a vocation.

> It's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom bicycle frames

Some kinds of blogging/newsletter-writing is cheap. Other kinds, particularly the investigative kinds, are not.

That's true, and what we are witnessing in real time is those forms of journalism evaporate, as the web destroys their business models.

I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism, in many, many ways.

> what we are witnessing in real time is those forms of journalism evaporate, as the web destroys their business models

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are doing fine. Smaller publications, too, like The Information seem to do okay. Paywalls work because (a) online ads are crap and (b) most readers are too cheap to pay unless forced to.

> I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism

I agree. I also think this blurring of the line has caused people to expect both for free, which is clearly untenable. That said, newspapers include op-ed sections and some "thinker" newsletters I subscribe to (e.g. Mike Allen's political daily) have broken legitimate news.

> If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else.

I'd double down on that, any site that has a free article limit (looking at you NY Times) I don't even bother with.

Or any site that whines about running an ad blocker.

True they need to make some cash to keep the lights on but I have never in my life bought something from seeing an online advertisement and don't really appreciate being tracked all over the interwebs.

What are you willing to give for the information you receive?

That's actually quite the thought provoking question.

I think, since I'm so accustomed to getting information gratis and don't really have very much disposable income, if push came to shove I'd just give up on all non-free sources of information and find some other way to occupy my free time -- perhaps quit being lazy and work enough to upgrade my computer so I could get back into Blender development or something along those lines. It's much too easy to spend hours reading random articles or watching the youtubes instead of being productive "for society" and I have a bunch of half-finished projects scattered across my harddrives that could easily keep me entertained if I lost access to free content on the internet.

When I ask myself this question, I find I'm not willing to pay for most blog articles, neither though advertising nor directly. When I follow through and forgo the information, I find other pursuits to fill the time, and these are usually more fulfilling. I feel more healthy after a morning of playing Minecraft or working on my Node app, than a morning of reading blogs and social media.

I agree, something feels impure about paying for knowledge, we should be pushing back on any kind of pay wall.

That said, I'm really not sure what system should be put in place to pay for quality content.

Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner?

Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.

>Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner?

I'm willing to put up with a considerable amount of inconvenience for open content, including advertising (as long as they are not tracking or using unknown scripts).

$5/month is also a lot of money to me, that currently covers: website, IRC, VPN and a game server. Most the people here may be on a better than average wage working within tech fields, so I imagine opinions to be skewed.

>Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.

I mentioned this originally and I'm not entirely aware of how to tackle this - but I think the overall cost to the user financially should be really low or nonexistent. That could mean an attention economy, mining coin on a specialized chip, or whatever other reasonable means. It should also be a choice where possible.

Another idea I thought of a while back would be to have people reading the content help share the load of hosting by acting as a peer. There's some not very well supported server sockets (last time I checked) coming for browsers that could make this possible, but equally with a well designed client. Potentially the more popular the content, the less it costs to run.

Blogs are already convenient to access anywhere, anytime and in a timely manner. Its called RSS.

Not sure how $5/month would improve on that.

The content for that RSS feed has to come from somewhere though. RSS is cool, but it doesn't seem sustainable by itself.

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