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Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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