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Comment by davidatbu | Hacker News Reader

Curious, what kind of monetization strategy are you in favor of for long form text content on the web, and why?

Probably the same one that Doctorow has used to monetize all his Creative Commons novels. It's jarring that I can freely read every book he's ever written (or at least most of them), but not a short blog post about a laptop.

It's like if Ubuntu's package manager started selling the ability to read reviews of the different packages. Canonical has already built a company around giving away an entire operating system for free.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-diffe...

I read two articles by Doctorow about his decisions about, and involvement around, copyright [0][1]. I didn't pick up on anything relating to how his decision to use CC affects monetization.

So assuming that Doctorow makes a living off of royalties of printed books, as well as speaking engagement fees, I don't think that this model is widely replicable, especially when it comes to currently paywalled content (like from Substack, WSJ, the Economist, NYT, etc), right?

[0] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/11/cory-doctorow-creat...

[1] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i...

Why does text content on the web need to be monetized at all?

Because people need to eat

Most of us solve that problem by getting a job.

So I suppose that you are categorically opposed to people's jobs being writing paywalled content. Why? Because it's annoying to see it pop up on HN?

I don't care what strategy they use. However, when a site like HN surfaces content it's a jarring experience when there's content you can't access because of a paywall.

They can keep their paywall and paid content, just get it off HN.

I guess its a good thing archive crawlers exist. There aren't many pages using techniques to avoid being crawled and cached so it works fine for now

I don't think it's official HN policy to keep paywalled stuff out. And is't it a bit presumptious to assume that everyone on HN would like to avoid paywalled stuff? For example, I appreciate being notified about the existence of high-quality paywalled stuff, even if I don't end up paying to unlock it.

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