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Comment by quakenul | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to take any "before the internet" sentiment seriously in 2019. It's been a while and things have changed, drastically, and we are not going back.

The thing about the internet is links. When I (theoretically) open a daily paper there is nothing for me to click on. The publisher has to make sure that the whole thing is self contained and can be consumed without any outside reference.

Websites, by design, are not self contained and that is because of links. Being able to reference other content through links is fundamental to how the internet works. The subscription/paywall model is anti-internet, because it breaks links.

While I do find some of the authors reasoning questionable, I concur: The classic subscription model, even though it may be the very thing that is keeping some publications afloat and very profitable, is deeply flawed for the internet.

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It's been a while and things have changed, drastically, and we are not going back.

Unfortunately, those changes have also involved replacing a lot of the better quality journalism -- genuine investigative reporting, expert analysis, insightful commentary -- with the dominance of third-hand reporting, your mate from the pub's analysis, targeted propaganda and clickbait headlines.

Real, substantial journalism still takes time and hard work and resources, and all of that still costs real, substantial money. Maybe "we are not going back" is today's reality, but going forward we certainly need to improve on the economic models we have today or the race to the bottom will continue until good quality journalism ceases to be a viable occupation.

> targeted propaganda and clickbait headlines

The UK tabloids have been quite capable of doing this in print before the Internet.

Yes, but the broadsheets weren't tabloid quality in those days. The culture of linking and aggregation and snippets hurts them as much as the red tops.

The thing with newspapers is not outbound links but inbound ones. We can see that on this very website; how much of HN is inbound links to news sites? How often do people complain that the inbound links are GDPR-broken or paywalled?

This is where the recent EU copyright directive controversy came from, an attempt to assert copyright in inbound link titles and snippets.

What I think customers would find most convenient is paying the aggregators (HN, twitter, FB etc) who would then pay on towards the content creators. The second-order effects of that system would probably be destructive though: spamming and new forms of clickbait.

The Brave browser is an interesting approach but I'm not going to use it unless I have to, and so I suspect for most people.

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