Hacker News Reader

Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

> These products are separate from the stories that appear in Facebook newsfeeds or Google search results — the platforms should arguably pay extra for that.

But... why? That’s like saying YCombinator should pay every website for the content being discussed on HackerNews.

> Given that the search giant can account for more than a quarter of their traffic ...

Sounds more like news organizations should be paying Goog/FB for referring users.

I truly believe that this is just further proof that News Media are unwilling to innovate and would rather focus on lobbying and regulations to maintain their status quo.

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The best solution would be for legacy media to opt-out and not have their stories shown. Then nobody is going to "steal" from them. Problem solved.

>That’s like saying YCombinator should pay every website for the content being discussed on HackerNews.

or not if you accept that there's a difference between a machine taking everything in an republishing it, and people selectively finding things from all times and posting them with most of the value being provided by the extra value of the comments.

But Google doesn’t republish anything? Sure there’s a snippet, but that shows up on any social media website too. The full content is only on the news website.

sorry, I was quick with the language, let us say linking to it then, but the fact remains there is quite a clear difference between what HN does and what Google does, and a law that means Google has to pay does not necessarily mean HN would have to pay.

It's obvious that HN adds a lot of value whereas Google does not.

Google search provides value by linking things that people are looking for - like any other search engine. Similar to the Yellow Pages, or any of the innumerable aggregators for things like travel, booking, shopping, etc.

They do not prevent people from using the website’s own search; it’s just that almost no one does so because a general purpose search engine is more useful to them.

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