The age of the à la carte internet | Hacker News Reader

The age of the à la carte internet

axios.com

I stopped consuming the news about a year ago and my life has been dramatically better and healthier for it. It's not really worth paying for something that is designed and coached into leaving you with a feeling of dread or political allegiance. I continue to hear about social issues and events from my friends but I mostly just listen and smile along with whatever their soap box issue may be at the time. That's to say, I hardly take any of this to heart or dedicate my time to thinking critically about things that will never affect me. I'm happier and healthier for it.

>That's to say, I hardly take any of this to heart or dedicate my time to thinking critically about things that will never affect me.

It must be nice to be that privileged. Most people are not lucky enough to be this insulated from society.

I always thought some of my friends would do what you did to me here, which is to dehumanize me for my choice to maintain my sanity. If you look through my posts you'll see I do belong to a protected class which has struggled for representation over decades, one which most recently saw people blowing their brains out in front of hospitals begging for the system to be better. Politics, in that way, can be perceived as life and death for my group, and of which I have very personal trials with.

For a time, I thought "educating" people on what these issues were would make them care more yet as group after group garnered national attention and my group was further deprioritized, villainized, and misrepresented I came to understand that even if people say they care, they will never care the way I care, and so the outrage to fix those issues will never come. It's an unrealistic expectation that everyone else will care about your issues as much as you do and my own experience being on the other end of this equation, where I'm being told this is life and death important, while having to ignore my own priorities and concerns tells me this is not a healthy construct.

That's to say, I was wasting time on people I don't know trying to rectify paradigms I was lucky enough to make it through when I could've spent time with my friends who are actually in them. Maybe I am privileged in your definition, in that I made it, but my life-experiences tell quite a different story.

I appreciate your thoughtful reply to my hasty comment.

I don't think it's about educating other people. It's about educating yourself and being an informed citizen. I think it would be better to engage with your friends on at least some level, instead of smiling along, because even if you're not educating them per se, it helps people feel like their struggle is shared and understood.

The other useful thing that I don't consider educating is pushing back to some extent on things they're reciting if they're wrong or lacking context. That's obviously a huge minefield, but can be helpful with many individuals if you know them.

Maybe we have different definitions of educating, maybe you don't know anyone where what I've said is an option, maybe you're already doing this and I never asked because my initial comment was thoughtless.

I will not push back on soap-box issues because, unfortunately, too many folks have uttered the line, "x issue is life and death for me and cannot be debated". I get that feeling, because my groups issues are like that for me, however my groups issues aren't of such popularity that I don't have to witness people doing exactly that. It's quite a frustrating paradigm, especially when your political allegiances land you among folks who have quite rich opinions about people of said group and the institutions around them (at times.)

All in all, I don't miss the news or politics. I hear about important things and am still "informed" just by the virtue of having a pretty eclectic group of friends. For instance, I heard about the rocket attacks on Israel because part of my team is in Israel. That prompted me to read the entire wikipedia article on this topic, which was illuminating in giving me a fact-based understanding; however what I lack is an opinion. What I don't get is the every day reminders of issues x, y, or z while seeing my groups issues ignored or deprioritized and when friends do this (probably inadvertently) I'm able to tolerate it because I hear it less.

Most people in fact are this privileged, they just choose not to remain as insulated as they could be.

let's all bike, jog, juggle in parks and leave some news every now and then

Black holes and star formation affect us way less than what's happening politically, but some people still enjoy thinking critically about those.

If you get too emotional over it, though, I guess you shouldn't.

I remember seeing the 2,400 year old fruit baskets discovered in Egypt [1] and wondering what political machinations, public scandals, soap box issues preoccupied the fruit eaters of that time.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113085

"You'll never believe what we found in the last Pharoh's tomb!"

I am very happy many news sites are now behind paywalls. There is now less of an incentive to drive revenue via clickbait or "picking a fight" as many tabloid journalists are wont to do.

There appears to be some kind of concern that this will put people in their own subscription bubbles. Please. Having a subscription to your city's newspaper or subscribing to a documentary streaming service is a far healthier way of ingesting content than getting put into algorithmic engagement bubbles via social media.

To be fair, most print newspapers were subsidized not necessarily by costing money or traditional advertising, but by classified advertising. Maybe news sites can figure out classifieds next.

I worked for a few different newspapers in the early '00s, including a nationwide conglomerate. Craigslist was the end. Papers have been struggling to make ends meet ever since.

Which is unfortunate because the Craigslist experience is terrible and 'Craig' doesn't want to update the site. It's chock full of spam, phone repair ads, and dozens of the same thing listed in every search. You would honestly think some employee could devise a way to detect and remove such things, but no.

I don't even care that the design of the site is 'old', I just want better listings.

In principle, I'm with you. Problem, though, is that even with subscriptions Google plus a million other crap companies are getting my clicks, and I still get Taboola shite padded after articles. So I cancelled my subscription to a high-profile newspaper/site just the other day. Quality journalism is not compatible with that shit for me as a matter of principle.

Stop by the comment section of the NYTimes' Facebook page sometime. Now that people can't read the articles without paying, the fights start off of the headline alone.

I subscribe, so I see the NYT's on-site comments, which are of far better quality.

> the fights start off of the headline alone

I think we have mountains of evidence that this happens whether or not there's a paywall. :)

Along with cable was PBS. Perhaps we will see efforts for publicly funded content, though dubious that civic engagement is high enough to swell it.

“State sponsored news” is generally seen as a bad thing(tm), so I don’t know how well that would work. There are good ones, for sure. Just that it’s not always a good thing.

> “State sponsored news” is generally seen as a bad thing(tm)

Very Debatable, capital D. Maybe in the US, but even there you have things like NPR and publicly funded libraries which are not seen as "bad things" as far as I can tell.

>Maybe in the US, but even there you have things like NPR and publicly funded libraries which are not seen as "bad things" as far as I can tell.

NPR is universally denounced by the American right as leftist/Democratic Party propaganda. Also PBS. Fox News once went so far as to call Mister Rogers an "evil, evil man."

As far as public libraries go, I've seen many claims that their only utility is as public toilets for the homeless.

NPR is universally denounced by the American right as leftist/Democratic Party propaganda. Also PBS.

This is a meaningless distinction when those in the American right also make claims that Fox News is too liberal.

Including: Six viewers who spoke with The Post mentioned a transfer of power to “the sons,” whom they said were “liberal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/12/27/fox-news-vie...

Fair point, but they've always hated NPR.

However, quite paradoxically, the same kind of people are happy with living along 'communist' streets, instead of insisting on them becoming privately owned toll roads. I guess, there's still hope.

Edit: Meaning, as long as we are social animals, information is infrastructure. And there seems to be still a place for public infrastructure that is not contested.

> those in the American right also make claims that Fox News is too liberal.

So if 1 person says Fox news is too left, then it's impossible to say "NPR is universally denounced by the American right as leftist/Democratic Party propaganda"

That's a bit overreaching argument that doesn't follow.

Well, it's a good thing that's not my argument, then.

Many "public" libraries in the US were/are funded by a trust initially started by a wealthy philanthroper.

Same with the guardian newspaper in a way.

It's an unused model in these days.

Modern rich guys would rather go to space than give back to the public in any way.

This is the second throwaway comment I've noticed you make in this thread, your first being to call someone privileged for deciding to limit their news intake.

I hate to be this guy, but the only "modern rich guys" I know of who have gone to space recently were Jeff Bezos, who donated ten billion dollars in 2020, the largest amount ever, towards mitigating climate change[0] and Sir Richard Branson, who donated half his money, two billion dollars in 2013[1].

But what have the Romans done for us?

It took me about 30 seconds to find these articles, and so I'm not sure what to conclude from your comment other than you were looking to score some cheap Internet points by hating the rich. Can you explain what your thought process went like, what motivations triggered your reaction here? I fundamentally would like to understand what happens to trigger this, "somebody else did something cool so we have to say bad stuff about them!" mode that so many folks seem to adopt.

[0]: Jeff Bezos made the single-largest charitable donation of 2020, toward climate change https://fortune.com/2021/01/04/jeff-bezos-largest-charitable...

[1]: Why Sir Richard Branson donated half his fortune ($2 billion) to charity: https://www.chatelaine.com/living/budgeting/why-sir-richard-...

It's not a cheap reaction to them "doing something cool", people this wealthy have not earned the right to be celebrated, because wealth is not a virtue. Multibillionaires actively make the world a worse place and their wealth comes at the expense of thousands below them. One individual should not have that much economic sway, they're like unelected nobility, unaccountable to anyone. They represent a staggering policy failure to build a humane society and their donations to charity, if any, are not a good substitute for what they have taken from society. Andrew Carnegie gave back substantially (76 billion, adjusted to GDP) to the society from which he derived his wealth. Billionaires these days are far less charitable.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/ceo-says-billionaires-...

>Based on these figures, MarketWatch reported Bezos donated just .5 percent of his net worth last year - a quarter of the 2 percent the average American donates each year.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/12/americ...

>And why should we believe that Gates or any other billionaire’s “boldness” necessarily reflects society’s values and needs? Oligarchies aren’t the same as democracies.

NPR is funded by large managed funds, huge agribusinesses, extractive industries, family foundations started by the people who own them, and listeners like you.

I've begrudgingly started paying for economist and FT.

And after that discovered that the feature I use the most isn't even subscriber only - their podcasts.

Oh well

Paying for journalism is a good thing. I too have subscriptions that I don’t strictly need.

Argh, surely if we all agree that paying for journalism is a good thing, we should do what we normally do for such things - take it from taxes?

Have a separate tax and an entity completely independent from the government with its own elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)#Gove...

Magazines cost money and they're still full of ads. Nothing will change online.

Because not All Ads are bad, but no one seems to be interested in making ads better.

Most ads are bad from the user perspective. Low information enticements rarely perform any useful function. High information discussions, product placement in entertainment, informative websites and tutorials are good, but the vast majority of ads are just terrible races to the bottom.

Isn’t that the problem with many things sold to broad audiences? Say feature bloat in Word or Excel, or how nearly every appliance has a clock as if everything else wasn’t flashing 12:00 already?

Oh, maybe the parent comment is that of an idealist who thinks things don’t have to be that way…

That's a difference I've never noted between ads that people want (for example, in trade magazines) and ads that people don't. Ads that people want are information dense, filled with tiny print, numbers, and multiple photographs.

Ads that people don't want try to be pretty, or entertaining. The prettiness is even biased towards minimalism.

edit: In the limit as bullshit -> 0, I'm pretty sure ads transform into pages from a wholesale/B2B catalog.

If you live in a "good" zip code, sometimes magazines just show up for free.

My theory is that publishers want to push their reader demographics in some direction, they will find a zip code that matches what they are looking for and start mailing magazines.

I had that happen once, and decided to cancel it as it was a waste of paper (and hard to recycle glossy paper at that). This was surprisingly difficult. It took two phone calls to figure out the third phone number, that would reach a person who could cancel it. I had to threaten to raise the issue with my state representative before they agreed to actually cancel it.

Online ads can see you

The subscription fee of most magazines is only there so that they can present a "paying subscribers" number to potential advertisers. The assumption being that a paying subscriber is more likely to spend money on advertised products.

This is why popular magazines constantly have deals for a year subscription for $5 or $10.

I think those dirt-cheap yearly subscription deals are a US thing. I'm not sure similar deals are common in the rest of the world.

Internet is vast. I am not paying for every content out there. If they ask for money, I will find a free version with ads. They can do whatever they want with their subscription models.

The key to this are really online advertising prices. Mind that 2009 – not that long ago and when online news were already much a thing, but paywalls were commonly not – was the all-time high in news paper revenues. From which follows:

1) Get advertising prices up again, this may also revitalise private publishing (e.g., the nowadays mostly vacant blog sphere, which has been extradited to the walled-garden infrastructure of video portals for the better part).

2) At the same time, have restrictions on the visual distraction of those adds (preferably static images) and, whenever possible, integrate them on the originating host/server, to de-incentivise ad-blockers.

3) Voilà, free news for everyone with thriving revenues, and, as a bonus, a blooming online publishing landscape.

have restrictions on the visual distraction of those adds (preferably static images)

My worry is that the height of the revenue you speak of in 2009 was because of stuff like this. That the invasive nature of the ads was what impressed ad-buyers so much and caused such a huge spend in the first place. That, coupled with the fact that online advertising was still fairly new and everyone thought it would be so much more effective than traditional advertising, mostly because of how flashy and unavoidable it could be.

It looks like the decline of newspapers happened shortly after that [0].

2009 was the year after a very newsworthy presidential election, so maybe there is some hope. However, in general, there's way more competition today from cable news, video sites like YT, and non-newspaper websites, that are either ad or reader supported. People are also not really buying physical papers anymore, either.

You also can't just handwave "get advertising prices up". How are you going to convince advertisers to pay more?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa...

ETA: I'm also having a hard time finding anything that suggests 2009 was a good year for newspapers. I can only find stories like this in the 2009 timeframe: US newspaper ad revenue down 27% in 2009 - https://phys.org/news/2010-03-newspaper-ad-revenue-naa.html

U.S. Newspaper Circulation Falls More Than 10% - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/media/27audit.ht...

Regarding prices: There is really no "natural" price, but the one that can sustain the entity providing the context, space and publishing reach. (Clearly, this is not the case at the moment.) In contrast, the collateral damage of not being able to afford tons of Google Adsense impact for less than a meal is probably tiny in comparison. (Especially, in a scenario, where your recipe blog may provide you with revenues worth a living, once established, which may well justify a small investment.) IMHO, the rational behind online advertising is completely off. – And, we may observe, this is partly due to newspapers outsourcing their control over prices together with their advertising departments, in favor of handing their powers over to the various ad provider networks. (We may also observe that it was then these networks, who radically devalued the context/quality and reach parts in the equation in favor of ad targeting, which was entirely in their domain of power.)

I can think of only a couple of ways that most articles published by "news" outlets are NOT entertainment:

1. Useful to inform voters 2. Useful for people who make business decisions

For 1, one can research the issues and candidates 3 weeks before an election, which will suffice to make an informed decision. For 2: it's important in many business niches to stay informed so as to make better decisions.

Therefore it seems like a more accurate description is: "media entertainment channels start charging subscription fees."

Are online subscriptions a bad thing? Paid newspapers support traditional journalism, paid newsletters create opportunities for independent writers, and there will still be non-paywalled content. Furthermore, subscriptions were standard in pre-internet days and news consumption has been pretty balkanized even without paywalls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com