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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I feel for sites that provide a service that want to bring users in, and still offer them some content up front for free.

Having said that as a user I should be able to be anonymous at will too...

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You can still offer people content for free and also not be defeated by incognito. Offer regular news articles for free, and make premium editorials and analysis require a (reasonably priced) subscription.

But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.

> while their subscription terms continue to be asinine

Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them. Infuriating.

At least as far as NYT Digital goes ... I can cancel my subscription online with the click of a button.

And I had to call to Croatia to cancel mine. There are definitely dark patterns these guys using. Which was very surprising to see from true-journalism-northern-star

Strange. I did JUST check mine and the option is there for me. Possibly they changed something between your adventure and mine.

Same with the Economist. They must have crunched some numbers and determined this is more profitable.

I usually “unsubscribe” from these kind of services by changing my credit card to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce.

With the Economist you can at least do it via email, or if you’re doing digital only you can use a subscription via Apple’s in app purchases etc and manage it that way.

> I usually “unsubscribe” from these kind of services by changing my credit card to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce

Yeah, luckily I subscribed through paypal, so I could block them through that.

That is ridiculous. I refuse to subscribe to anything that makes it difficult to unsubscribe.

I learned my lesson from LA Fitness. Check the cancellation process before signing up for anything that requires a contract.

I suppose that should be common sense, but I never thought about it until I had to mail a freaking letter to their HQ requesting cancellation.

I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access

The regional newspaper in my state is $25/6 months, which includes the physical Sunday paper and DRM-free downloadable PDFs of the newspaper every day that you can view on any device.

About a year ago I looked around at papers in other states, and the pricing and benefits were similar. It's only the super-premium papers that charge much more, but even the New York Times maxes out at $40/month for physical Sunday + digital. I'm OK paying a premium for the New York Times because I understand it's expensive to pay reporters and editors and photographers to travel to and live in cities around the world.

I think if the people who whine about "I'd pay $xx if the newspaper only did $yy" actually put their money where their mouths are, journalism (especially local) would be in a better place.

I did my last check-through of all the newspaper plans about 3 months ago, and out of the 6 on my list, not one offered a clear cut subscription. I actually, really don't want a physical newspaper. I do want clear subscription terms.

Your regional newspaper does sound super reasonable though, and I hope more newspapers follow that general model.

Not clear what newspapers you’re looking at but NYTimes has these options that seem to meet your criteria.

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/gift

That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week and that doesn't even get me their cooking section.

That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week

Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend.

that doesn't even get me their cooking section.

Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to read anyway!

But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.

I'm confused, where did you get the impression that he only wants to read the cooking section and nothing from the regular newspaper?

Or do you want him to pay $200 for the general contents + $40 a year for recipes? Is it the same kind of deal for getting business breaking news or yoga tutorials? That seems crazy to me.

$4 per article for a paper that's $2.50 on newsstands is not a reasonable price.

> But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.

Stop that. The original goalpost clearly says $25-50.

Minor nitpick, the Sunday NYTimes is $5 in NY or $6 elsewhere. Mon - Sat are indeed $2.50.

It's a reasonable request that I concur with. This sort of piecemeal subscription model is really annoying. The main reason all other streaming services took off was because people didn't want piecemeal cable bundles. Once you pay for a subscription, you should get everything under that banner. No more paywalls. That's a reasonable expectation when seen in the context of other streaming services. Second, if you are pretending to be a tech company offering soft services on the internet, act like one. nytimes is the slowest and most bloated ad/tracking infested site that I visit. It brings firefox mobile to a crawl. This may be one of the reasons why a middleman like apple news may actually work, simply by reducing the friction. If you can make nytimes.com behave like lwn.net, I would pay.

>Important journalism isn't free.

Isn't it? It seems that most journalism these days consists of taking things from a news agency feed and polluting them with garbage opinions. Might as well read the source.

The problem is there is so much content available on the web, but there isn't yet a federated subscription service to support it all. I would pay ~ $5 a month for news access, but I'm certainly not going to pay 2 or 5 or 10 dollars a month for each random site I visit to read their couple articles that may interest me. I just will skip their content.

Sounds like Apple News?

Yep. And if the price of two cups of coffee a month is too much of a burden on one's wallet, there's always Blendle for 40¢ an article.

I go the other direction. I am way too fast a reader and read too widely to handle per-article microtransactions well. I do have a subscription to a couple of my top magazines and news sources, but end up reading up to the free allotment on many, many more every month. I'd happily pay $30-50/mo for unlimited access to many sources, but it'd have to have 10+ of my favorites on board to make it worthwhile. I read 20-50 serious articles a day, across free and paywalled and subscription content. I'm unwilling to pay $10-25/mo for each source individually. But if the average could get down around $5/mo for each major source (that I'll read 15-50 articles/mo from, given the access), and leftover change to the ones I read only occasionally, I'd be delighted. Basically, yeah, I want Spotify for journalism, even if it's a good bit more expensive.

How have I not heard of Blendle? Thanks for the reference!

Thats not federated though. It's the opposite. That's a centralized middleman.

As Maciej Cegłowski pointed out some years ago, we already have a working micropayment system for content.[1] Unfortunately, the payments are going to carriers/service providers to pay for the page bloat that comes from not having another micropayment system.

[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

> Offer regular news articles for free, and make premium editorials and analysis require a (reasonably priced) subscription

Why would they offer facts for free and charge for the opinions they are trying to use their reputation on facts to promote?

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