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Comment by GreeniFi | Hacker News Reader

Previous thinking (based on experience) was that people paid for access to a news platform rather than to individual name-brand writers. This was apparently why earlier efforts at micro-payments for articles failed and/or subscriptions failed.

Ben Smith seems to think something has changed in the market such that people are now willing to make small payments to individual writers. However Smith does not say what has changed.

I’d be curious to know what’s different this time and welcome any insight from the board.

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My take is that previous attempts were "how can we get news readers to pay", and current attempts are "what news do people who pay for news want".

And in general, if you pay for news, you want opinionated voices you can deeply trust, and whose bias you're familiar with. That's not possible on an aggregated news platform, since that by its nature will try to be all things to a fairly large group of people - you need a mass audience to pay for all the writers. Individual writers can afford a smaller audience. (Which also means they can avoid giving away much content to regularly draw an audience)

What that means for large-scale/expensive reporting is an interesting question, because the independent model doesn't work for that almost by definition.

I think this is right.

> whose bias your are familiar with I This is fair, but there is a positive version which is "whose worldview you understand, and find interesting/valuable"

Every person and organization comes with some kind of bias - even if part of that bias is "try to be clear eyed and tell the truth".

The advantage of subscribing directly to writers is that you get to choose explicitly who you want to trust, and having done so the writers' incentive is to keep that trust.

As a writer, you get to make your own bet about what work is important, you get paid in proportion to the value you create, and only your readers can fire you.

while your description of the phenomenon may be somewhat accurate for some subset of news consumers, the implication that this is a reasonable position is disturbing.

truth and trust do intertwine deeply in the subconscious, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our conscious brains to disentangle them when it leads us astray.

we should seek a variety of reasonable perspectives, especially including differing ones to our own. trust the reasonable, even if disagreeable. that's what get us to truth, not a flight to homogeneity.

and that's the lament here--it's getting harder and harder to find reasonable perspectives because every media outlet, even the venerates like nytimes, are leaning hard into partisanship and tribalism.

>I’d be curious to know what’s different this time

possibly a more personal interaction with the people who create the content. Same reason twitch or patreon has a lot of appeal. it's a sort of community more than an actual transaction in exchange for content.

Traditional journalists and name-brand writers rarely ever entered into personal relationships with their readers and in many ways it was important to not be swayed by the readership themselves. With the rise of these independent creators it seems more like the opposite. I honestly don't think this is good for publishing necessarily because it's kind of like a mini-cult even.

The internet generation/Millennials grew up and now they have disposable income.

We have micro-disposable income.

Ben Thompson has a good article about what is different now: https://stratechery.com/2020/never-ending-niches/

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