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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to pay for all of the articles I read, a large number of them are terrible and shouldn't be encouraged.

I don’t want to pay for all the meals I eat, a large number of them are terrible... So I don’t go back. But you have to pay for what you eat.

Na, I go in and buy a cooked fish then split it among thousands like a digital Jesus.

Oh. I did read your comment before posting mine, and laughed. But just now I see that you suggested the same approach. How embarrassing.

With the monthly digital subscription model, you end up paying for all you could possibly ever eat. Most of which you could never eat.

Unless you automated the "eating", and resold what you didn't need. Which is disgusting, and in the case of online media, almost certainly illegal.

But that is an interesting idea. Buy digital subscriptions to every media outlet that you'd ever want to read, and resell page views, using some sort of proxy setup. And yeah, illegal as hell.

What you were suggesting in the parent comment was a pay-as-you-go system wherein you pay something like $0.10 per article.

True.

I was just riffing on how to deal with pervasive paywalls that required full subscriptions.

A lot of articles don't nourish me, they make me stupider. I wouldn't pay for a poisoned meal.

To continue this analogy. When I go to a restaurant and order a steak I don't get told by the waiter that I should really be eating vegan gluten free instead.

What really bothers me the most about modern "news" is that a lot of it is really just biased political commentary and editorials masquerading as news.

Or just as insidious, thinly veiled advertisements.

Biased political commentary's better than armchair political campaign strategy commentary and horserace-style campaign coverage. At least that's about something that might matter. Looking at you, NPR.

It's no secret that many news articles these days are simply paid advertisements. Generally, I avoid the Big N mainstream "news providers" and stick to some combo of HN, twitter and reddit just to name a few.

> What really bothers me the most about modern "news"

Wait until you learn about the origin of the term "yellow journalism".

I know of no restaurants that would charge you if you got food poisoning. But saying that when you ordered a colossal burger it went straight to your waistline isn't a good excuse not to pay. Don't go in if you don't want to pay.

Beginning to be off-topic, but I'm curious...

The problem is, the food poisoning usually manifests after you've already paid and left the resturant.

Could one do a credit card charge-back if they get sick after eating out? (Too bad I pay using cash though, so I am SOL.)

So having them behind a penny wall would work out fine?

I doesn't physically cost any practical amount of money to read an article, a tiny amount of processing power and data transfer. A physical meal costs orders of magnitude more.

I understand why we should pay for articles but if you enforce payment then you'll see a flood of poorly written click bait and a race to the bottom.

Im not suggesting that it will work (to pay per article as we’re describing). But the idea that you should get something for free because you don’t like it isn’t how most things work. Caveat emptor.

Conversely, people said it didn’t cost any practical amount of money to listen to music, yet Spotify thrives.

Spotify thrives because it is more convenient than piracy.

And what is more convenient than an ad blocker?

FWIW, "I didn't like it" returns culture has been growing in the US for a while. If you've ever run an Amazon seller account, you'll have gotten plenty of returns from customers for no reason other than that they didn't like the thing they bought or it "didn't meet expectations". The Costco returns line is also packed with people doing this. Point is, the mindset of not paying for something because you didn't like it is quickly making its way into the physical goods world as well, so it's not as simple as shooting down this digital goods mindset entirely.

What about payment with a refund option? Obviously this could be abused (and likely would be), but I'd think most people would only use the refund option if the article was truly terrible / clickbait.

Or a variant, give a reader the option to deny paying the media outlet within some time window, but the reader doesn't get any of the money back.

This does mean the payment processor and the outlet have to be independent entities. That, though, nicely opens up another possibility of what to do with that money that is denied: distribute it proportionally to all other articles from all other media outlets. Proportionate to what is also a question, but I suspect proportionate to non-denied payment from the processor makes the most sense.

What if the system paid for articles read automatically, but there was a button you could use to negate the fee? So if you click something and it turns out to be clickbait or some other trash you can retroactively revoke the payment. Make the process just painful enough (maybe a CAPCHA) to discourage abuse and it might work. Most people are honest and if the fees are reasonable they won't go to the effort to revoke them every time. The few that do revoke every fee weren't going to pay in the first place and at least this might discourage them from setting up an underground service to duplicate your content wholesale.

On the other hand most people don't like getting nickled and dimed to death.

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