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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

12ft ladder for 10ft paywalls, eh? I hadn’t seen this before.. it’s got quite the aggressive charter:

> Why?

> I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.

> You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter.

I find the current state of the web, post-AdWords, disappointing too.

edit: apologies, it was submitted and discussed a month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29679716

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If you hate the ad-driven web, bypassing paywalls seems wildly backwards.

Do we want to make sites attempting to do something other than SEO-spam harder to find in search?

> If you hate the ad-driven web, bypassing paywalls seems wildly backwards.

I don't think that's totally fair. I would love to be able to pay for a single day of the NY Times or Wall Street Journal, the same way I can buy a copy of the print edition on a given day. But, it's all or nothing with the paywalls - I have to buy a full annual subscription just so I can read half a dozen articles one or two days a week.

I don't think most people are opposed to paying for content - look at kindle sales. But that doesn't mean most people want to commit to an annual subscription that runs in the 100's of dollars.

I don't know. I won't pay for a single day or a single article from NYT or WSJ. If it is freely available I might read it.

I honestly have no solution for their problem. It's a bad position to be in. Their content is just not valuable enough to pay for. At least for me.

I pay for books and ebooks all the time, so I'm not opposed to paying for reading material. It's just that I value books much higher than news or opinion pieces.

I agree with this, but I think it's a step in the right direction. To wit, imagine a service like this, but it costs $20/mo, and it breaks all paywalls for you but allocates that $20 to the pay-walled things you read that month, piecemeal. It would save you a great deal of friction, far fewer accounts to maintain, and reduce your dependency on any single news-source. And of course authors stand to gain - as long as they are okay accepting a variable allocation for each consumption (which they almost certainly are).

Google tried this. It didn't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_share

Perhaps if Google didn't treat every other party as a source of wealth to plunder, by hook or by crook, but rather shared the spoils with the very content generators so crucial to their own existence, out of some sense of fair play, we'd have a marginally more healthy ecosystem today.

Perhaps.

But I'm content to burn the whole thing down. All ad-supported business models are eventually utterly toxic. Well, at least the ones that succeed.

Can I please just have the government provide value for taxes and fund well reputable journalistic pursuits; some smaller ones locally, major ones nationally, and a trickle of funding globally (in aggregate among countries this should work out).

The primary purpose of journalism is to hold public officials to account. They can't do that while dependent on public officials for their paycheck.

Think about what you're asking. You want the government to take your money and give it to media outlets of their choosing? Just give your own money to the media outlets of your choosing.

> The primary purpose of journalism is to hold public officials to account.

No, that's a benefit journalist enterprises sell.

The primary purpose of journalism (at least, in a capitalist society), is, as for any other industry, to capture and deliver value to the capitalist class.

So if I understand you correctly, a guy with a weekly newsletter covering the local political beat who charges a $10/month subscription fee and uses it entirely to pay his own salary is doing so for the purpose of delivering value to the capitalist class.

Is he the capitalist class, this person making say $40,000/year? Are his customers meant to be? Do they become the capitalist class when there are two of them writing the newsletter and they split the money?

> So if I understand you correctly, a guy with a weekly newsletter covering the local political beat who charges a $10/month subscription fee and uses it entirely to pay his own salary is doing so for the purpose of delivering value to the capitalist class.

No, I said that the primary purpose of the industry was one thing, not the primary purpose of a particular one man operation that is inherently made marginal by the structure of the economy, and is not the typical of the industry as a whole.

The industry is whatever the customer demands it to be. If you don't like CNN and Fox, don't watch them. They have no monopoly on journalism (as yet).

That's not true, the industry is whatever gives it's _owners_ the most utility.

> a trickle of funding globally

There is already RFERL aka Radio Freedom.

OTOH:

In UK, Germany and a bunch of other countries there is state-funded media.

One can argue that in France or Russia all media is state funded and state controlled.

Sadly, it doesn't work on nytimes.com

I just turn off JS on NYT. It won't show the pictures though.

Click on the padlock in the chrome location bar, click on cookies, block cookies for the domain.

They have a 13ft paywall.

I wonder how serious that charter is. Sites don't use paywalls to get people to sign up for newsletters, they want people to pay. Bypassing their paywalls seems more likely to get them to use SEO garbage—not move away from it.

Stealing candy from a gas station is wrong, but stealing an article from behind a paywall is right, because.... The latter is easier to get away with

This kind of nonsense is at the heart of a lot of our problems. Yes, someone producing interesting content and making it available widely should be paid for their labour and expenses. But the marginal cost of each reader is very close to zero, unlike the candy. The root cause of the disconnect is greed; where people believe the extra value massive scalability in tech offers should just accrue to them directly as a seller, trying to drive per-unit margins back up towards the money they would get from selling a newspaper.

If digital advertising was banned and good journalism could be identified by "I have to pay a small amount for this", competition would drive the costs down in a way which makes proper use of that scalability, and we would all be better off.

Said another way, the primary competitors to newspapers are garbage content that is already free that is provocative that can drive advertising dollars and that consumes attention. The only difference with the internet is that there’s more content that eats up time, some of which can actually be as good as the content the newspapers provide or better because expertise niches can form that is either volunteer run or can charge money for the content.

The first century worth of newspapers were ridiculously biased rags. They existed as political, social, and commercial propaganda for whomever funded them, and they were bought by people who liked that kind of thing.

I think modern professional journalism was a fluke of history. Without independent funding it's going right back to its original state. And the only way that independent funding will happen is with a highly educated and involved citizenry, which scares the living crap out of the powerful.

> Stealing candy from a gas station is wrong, but stealing an article from behind a paywall is right, because.... The latter is easier to get away with

They don't give you the option to pay for an article. The only two choices are pay a couple hundred bucks for an annual subscription that you likely won't use more than a few times, or bypass the paywall.

To follow your analogy, this would be like if the gas station only sold gum in packs of 365 - you want a day's worth of gum, but you can only buy a yearly supply. I'll bet you'd see a lot more people stealing gum.

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