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Comment by temikus | Hacker News Reader

It may be general resistance to a concept. More and more services are becoming subscription based, so 5$ here, 5$ there and the cost creeps further.

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Exactly.

It's hard enough to save money as it is.

News websites blow my mind with this - if I forked over $5 to every news outlet I occasionally like to read, I'd be spending at least $500 maybe more per year JUST to get access to some random person's biased recant of what's happening in the world. If there were a news source that did the opposite of this, and basically provided a bullet list of objective, non-biased events boiled down to exactly what I need to know, that might be something I'd pay for. Hell, it would save you time over filtering the opinionated BS out.

Providing objective, non-biased events would be very hard.

Consider for example the current riots going on in the US. How do you objectively report on that? With bias, on one side you have "peaceful protest disrupted and escalated by the police", on the other side you have "police intervening in riots to maintain order and protect property". There's not really inbetween.

"Protesters say their peaceful assembly has been disrupted and escalated by the police. The police argue they've only been intervening in riots to maintain order and protect property."

Done.

If you have to represent "both sides" (in many cases there'll be more than two sides really), you end up having to give a voice to nutjobs, plus you present both sides as equally valid assessments.

Much as we'd all love an "unbiased" news source, the reality is that bias is a very hard problem to solve well.

Indeed, just repeating what people say about an event may be factual, but without any concept of what is actually true, it can’t be considered objective.

If one side is lying, objective reporting would tell you which side it was.

I explored building exactly that but turns out there’s no money in it. Most people want the narrative with the facts, if not more so.

There's a big market for this, it's just not for individuals. For example, Bloomberg distributes factual news on its terminal. The Bloomberg terminal even highlights important words in news stories so you can absorb the information more quickly. So if there was a earthquake somewhere, it might highlight the word "earthquake," the number of people that died, and the economic cost, for example.

Also there are news wire services that do mostly what you're describing. If you just want to be entertained (most people read news for entertainment), then they don't really care about the facts. They want to hear about so and so blasting so and so or whatever. But if you're trying to make money from information (traders, journalists, etc), then you really don't want to be reading the kind of stuff the New York Times is publishing.

I ran the math on this once.

Just a subscription to The Information is $399/yr. Add a subscription to the Times, and you've already blown past your $500 budget.

Mind blowing, imagine paying $5 for each newspaper one wants to read.

You’re missing the point. If there’s a news source that you occasionally read then it’s far more cost effective for you to just buy the paper at the stand for 50¢ the few times you want it. Same with magazines. If you read every newspaper then getting lower cost and delivery in return for the paper getting consistent revenue is a good deal for both parties.

If you get your news like most people, via link aggregators like HN, Reddit Facebook, Twitter then you get linked to dozens of publications that all want a $5/mo. commitment which is untenable.

It would be neat if news sites would start offering 50 cent day passes instead of difficult to cancel subscriptions.

I sort of half thought apple news might go that way. might not be cost effective - bundling larger subscription stuff is probably more revenue/profit.

But... in their news app, there's always a couple of interesting articles I might want to read, but I'm not signing up. They have my info, and a Touch ID device I'm holding tied to my payment info. "Read this article for 50c?" I'd certainly give some a read now and then.

My daily newspaper costs 2€ at the newsstand, not cents. With a monthly subscription of 5€. Pretty much worth it.

I have been subscribing valuable information sources since 1995, so I do get the point.

Except it’s not $5, it’s $5 to sign up, then an email and a phone call and your firstborn dog to unsubscribe. If it were microtransactions, that’d be one thing...

If the service doesn't play ball there is always the consumer protection agency.

That doesn’t work. I find it better to stay anonymous and avoid spam from these services.

The perpetual spam is worse for me than the $5.

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