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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

But, it's not direct payment to publishers. It's indirect via twitter. You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions. Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

This is mostly my hot take just based on the press release, but color me dubious. Local news is struggling nationwide and this doesn't feel like a solution. It feels like silicon valley looking to increase profits for their shareholders to the detriment of the world.

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> You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions.

I don't mind paying for news. However, I do mind being on hold for 2 hours on a 1800 number that I had to dig up from some defunct webpage to cancel my subscription.

This is already illegal if you are in California and you can call your representatives and tell them to support the Unsubscribe Act to make it illegal nationwide.

House link- https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3953

Senate link - https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/207...

OK but for the ~88% of Americans who don't live in California the point stands, at least today.

I've mentioned this before: switch your address to a California one, cancel now that you're a Californian, optionally switch it back to your proper address.

Worked for me with several publications.

Sending physical mail can be effective, too, and can use less of your time in a trade for additional walltime.

> You can pay publishers directly already by buying subscriptions

But that's not how most of us access news. We look at sources like Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook, Google News for links to articles.

Subscribing to a single website doesn't work in this model.

Why wouldn't it work? You simply subscribe to a publisher you are valuing.

How many different publishers did I visit once or twice this week? Probably a lot, but I’m not sure which, or how much all of them would cost.

Subscription-only articles suffer from the opposite of the network effect. If I pick 1/n publishers to subscribe to, and you pick 1/n, the odds I can read something you tried to share are only 1/n^2. It might help if there were wire services for major topics I care about.

It's quite the feat to convince someone to pay for something they already get for free, particularly in the digital space... Aha! The answer has been right under our noses the entire time: we need to sell online media subscriptions as NFTs!

If I subscribed to every publisher I valued, I'd pay more than I pay for Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Disney+ combined!

I think if the music industry can come out with a 1-subscription-fits-most model, I'm sure the journalism industry can figure out how to evenly distribute a modest $5-15 subscription fee.

Who is "we"? I look at aggregators but I also subscribe at the source for publications I value.

It's difficult to find valuable sources though. I'm currently spending over $100 a month on subscriptions, and and I still feel like my sources are biased and myopic.

> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

Isn't that what they're already doing? Except the payer is the advertiser instead of the platform itself via the subscriber.

Professional journalism has always had this problem to a degree; there's always been an advertiser or other funding source you don't want to piss off. Twitter just exacerbates this by rewarding the most sensational, attention-grabbing posts.

Editors writing clickbait headlines have been guilty of this for so, SO long. And it has gotten worse over time, even as the actual articles are increasingly behind paywalls. Complain about headlines which have almost no bearing on anything that could be called truth, and you’ll be accused of not reading the article… as if that’d get the headline-writers off the hook.

If you've noticed a lot more paywalls going up it's because the era of clickbait is actually dying. Serious newsrooms have always hated it and shriveling ad revenue has finally tipped back towards subscriptions being the most viable path to profit. Content farms and their SEO game is far less valuable than it used to be.

> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

Wouldn't payment integration with Twitter (if executed well) just make it easier for Twitter users to convert to paying the publisher after seeing the publisher's tweet? I don't see how it would increase the incentive for a publisher to post clickbait tweets, except perhaps for publishers whose in-house payment flow is very poorly implemented or nonexistent.

disagree with this point. I rather have more objective ads driven journalism than subscription "professional journalism". subscription are even more biased and create further silos for mis/information.

> Publishers angling for retweets to get nickels from twitter's algorithm is anathema to professional journalism.

To what?

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