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Comment by efreak | Hacker News Reader

I have nothing against making certain content unavailable to nonsubscribers. You can even pick, say, three articles a day to be free and put the rest behind a paywall. You can also block every article and make a short summary available for free.

What I have an objection to is the fact that current paywalls give everyone different free content every day--thus when an article is shared to nonsubscribers they can't actually finish it--and they don't find out until they've already started. All because they've already read their free 3 articles of the month. If it was 1-2 articles free daily, I'd probably have less problems with it than 5-10 per month. I don't usually read any of their articles at all on any given day, and my average would probably stay the same.

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To be clear, your argument is:

"I'd rather be able to get 30-60 free articles a month, than 5-10."

Not exactly earth shattering here. You want more free. So do many people. Regardless of how little or much of it you'd consume, you're still asking for more of their content to be available free.

Or put another way:

"I'd like to ensure I can read all I want from them without paying anything. Please update your "free" policies to make my particular consumption pattern completely free."

With the implied, "If I did start reading 3 articles (instead of 1-2) on the the occasional days I land on your website, I'd also like you to up your daily free limit to 3 at that point."

Journalism is a profession and a business. This idea that I should be paid for my work, but nobody else should be paid for theirs is particularly poor for society.

I'd be happy to pay something, like 25 cents an article, or even a buck a month, for you know 60 articles or something. But for me to subscribe to WaPO, and NYT, I have to pay something like 240 bucks a year, when I get most of news from news aggregators.

Idk, I don't think it's too much to ask. Good journalism takes a lot of work.

Good journalism wouldn’t rely on [please subscribe to read rest of comment].

Good software engineering doesn't rely on [please pay to access app].

The problem as I see it is not that I can't pay or don't see the value in good software or journalism, but that charging $$ is negatively correlated with trustworthiness and quality. Or at least not positively correlated.

more than I'm willing to spend considering the number of news sources I'm already paying for.

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