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Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

Side point: Thanks for the link but I don't like seeing archive.org encouraged to beat paywalls. They do a great job archiving information and might see their access reduced if people use them in this way.

Hope that doesn't sound like I'm having a go at you, and I may be wrong in my understanding of this landscape but thought I would mention.

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I agree with paying journalists for their work. but, They never provide a means to pay for the content of just the one article. I don't want a new magazine subscription everytime I surf to a new link. So, forgive me if I don't have much sympathy for a news organization that refuses to get up to date with how the internet works. The internet is on demand. If you want people to pay, it should also be on demand. Not, ohhh now you have to pay 200$ for a year long subscription just to read 1 little article which I was only going to look at for 60 seconds anyway.

> So, forgive me if I don't have much sympathy for a news organization that refuses to get up to date with how the internet works.

News organizations probably understand "how the internet works" better than you do. (Not too surprising since their livelihood depends on it.)

Lots of research and many many real-world attempts clearly demonstrate that small-scale individual transations do work effectively. The cognitive cost of a user having to choose to buy each small product outweighs the value and adds so much friction that most users simply don't buy it.

Subscriptions have their own challenges, but overall, they have shown to be a much more effective model than microtransactions.

No business is obligated to build an entire transaction system that works the way each particular customer wants it. If you don't want to buy the product the way they choose to sell it to you (in this case, with a subscription) then you can simply choose not to buy it.

You have no moral right to claim "I'm going to take this for free because they didn't sell it to me the way I like."

i didn't say anything about taking the content. they just shouldn't be surprised when people don't pay for those subscriptions on the internet the way they do for Print.

You may want to check out Blendle - it does exactly what you ask. You pay for the article you read.

I agree with this sentiment but archive.org didn't work for me anyways, I got slightly farther down the page before the paywall obscured the content.

So what do you propose? Rarely is there any other usable access link

I mean... paying for high quality journalism is an option (for most HN readers, anyway)

In the old days, you could either subscribe to a periodical OR go to a newsstand and make a one-time payment for a single issue. E-commerce has not yet figured out an analogous model to let me just read one thing without subscribing. We get "free articles" but no "pay a $1 and read this thing" option.

This 100%. I'm not going to subscribe to the Economist to read one article every 6 months. I might pay $0.10 to read this particular article though.

From the late 1990's to early 2000's, there were a number of online companies (would now be called SaaS) including Qpass in Seattle that solved this problem for companies like NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and many more. Turns out that customers really didn't want to do that for written articles; subscriptions just worked better.

That turned out differently for things like mobile apps.

(Source - worked at Qpass for multiple years.)

Aside from paying for the quality journalism that people think is missing, I recommend checking out your local library for digital and paper subscriptions.

Raise your hands, contribute to the spirit bomb.

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