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Comment by ausbah | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why hacker news hates subscriptions so much. the NYT is always producing content so it has constant costs, everyone hates ads / they might now pay enough - so subs are the next best option?

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Subscriptions are an overused pricing model. Businesses love subscriptions because they love recurring revenue. The desire for RR pushes businesses to pursue products the fit the revenue model rather than solving customer problems. Consumers notice their bills stacking up with subscriptions and start to question the value they're getting for their subscription fees.

Some examples off the top of my head:

1. Grubhub's Plus, https://www.grubhub.com/plus

2. The majority of streaming services

3. Stitch Fix's recurring fix

4. Video game industry subscriptions (too many to dig into)

NYT's slavish devotion to a subscription model follows this pattern. They want to get subscriptions so they structure offerings to fit. Compare to a platform like Substack, where they offer a rich ecosystem with just a few different price models. I've believed for some time that news media like NYT overvalue their current offerings and need to innovate. Doesn't seem like they're interested.

Don't take my statement to claim all subscription offerings are bereft of value. Simply that there are so many lazy offerings that subscriptions are better as a signal of waste than value.

Excellent comment

Because it limits the content to only people who read enough NYT to be worth the subscription cost to them. It doesn't match most people's use case of bumping into a NYT article once in a while.

The NYT hasn't done anything yet, but why wouldn't people (here or anywhere else) be disappointed to see something they enjoyed that was free and easy to access suddenly become pay-walled off, plastered with ads, and used to mine their personal data?

The NYT has been the paper of record in the US for a very long time. To me, the strategy just seems very short sighted.

There is no doubt in my mind that the paywall will ultimately lead to the paper’s decline. The prestige of The NYT as an institution is that everyone reads it. That cannot be the case on the Internet when competing with voluminous free content.

At the very least, all the frontpage articles should not be paywalled. Even historically one could read the most important Times’ articles just glancing at a newsstand.

That's also how it works today, right? You can look at the front page for free, but you need a subscription if you want to read full articles.

There is a scan of the frontpage but it’s not legible.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/pageone/sc...

I get paywalled on the first article on nyt.com.

That's a scan of the printed version. You can look at the front page (nytimes.com) for free, but you need a subscription if you want to read more free articles than a limit allocated to non-subscribers. "Paywalled" means you can't read the full article, it's hidden or truncated.

The front page of the printed edition has 5 full paragraphs.

The web version shows a headline and one sentence.

Those are links to articles, not the full articles themselves. Similar to the "continued on page x" in the printed version, you will need to go to the full article to read its contents.

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