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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

Honestly only case where I'm willing to overlook it. It's so hard for them to stay in the black. I can't imagine, in this age. For a serious newspaper that does good investigative journalism, I'll accept some desperate measures to keep subscribers and not hold it against them.

Any other company and I'd call them garbage, but the NYT does a lot of good. (Same would go for other top investigative journals that have published a lot of pieces revealing major information to the public.)

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> For a serious newspaper

Unfortunately this is now a debatable topic. Their headlines have been trending towards the National Enquirer for years.

IMHO, they should crash and burn.

Also then drama in the newsroom. It does not inspire optimism about the professionalism and objectivity of their coverage.

They're not a charity or a nonprofit that relies on donations. They're a business selling a product, and the only thing that should rationally factor into giving them money or not is if you want to buy the product. Need doesn't factor into the equation.

Some business and industries do more social good than others. We're all still adjusting to the internet. I'm on the side of leaning towards giving NYT a pass for this. It was a single chat interaction, not so bad.

No business gets a pass for crappy behaviour bordering on malpractice. NYT is a left-leaning, propaganda paper today which has fired most of its older and rational staff writers and editors.

The NYT has been doing really, really well financially the last 4 years. Their stock price is up almost 300% since 2016--not the only metric, obviously, but it certainly gives some indications of how concerned investors are that it will stay in the black.

Other, smaller papers are not doing nearly as well.

You must really like the NYT. These dark patterns are never excusable.

eh, I don't know. NYT sucks up a LOT of talent from across the country. What I'm saying is: this sort of thing is maybe excusable from small/independent journalism outlets trying to stay afloat, but you don't need to make excuses for NYT. They pay their own executives handsomely to do that.

NYT has been a net negative on society since 2016, rapidly so since 2019.

Elaborate??

NYT was once known as the paper of record decades ago. In the past recent years they have starting slipping on their journalist standards and reliability. They were pivotal in pushing the WMDs in iraq for example as well as russian collusion.

What would you recommend, then?

Substack. Citizen journalism is the future. The MSM solely exist to make every problem your problem through an omnipresent stream of manufactured outrage.

One reason I don't click links that go to Substack is that the founders seem happy to donate free content to alt-right outlets. I don't give traffic to organizations like that.

If they really need to rely on dark patterns just to survive - which I highly doubt is the case - then they simply don’t deserve to survive.

Yes, it sucks, but that’s how the free market works.

Presumably not, if they use dark patterns and not only survive, but thrive. Right?

Again, I highly doubt that NYT relies on these dark patterns, but I could be wrong.

If NYT actually relied on these tactics to keep themselves afloat, then I wouldn’t call it “thriving”, simply because these kinds of techniques are not sustainable at all in the long run.

Well, the OP is about a dark pattern...

And a common definition of thriving is growing in profitability, for which stock price can often be a good metric. Their stock price gas increased 289% over the last five years.

A while back someone posted a look into their finances and business strategy. They were fumbling the ball a decade ago, but are now doing extremely well

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