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Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

> I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity when it comes to news

When it comes to news, I'm of the opinion that one should strive for diversity of opinion rather than quality. As you noted, all media has a bias so you should see what everyone's biases are. You will never get truth from any single media outfit so cast a wide net.

> What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist.

Why would you pay for something that has ads? It would be like paying facebook for a facebook account.

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Print ads are a lot less obtrusive for me compared to digital ads. It's literally just a piece of paper that I don't have to look at. They don't have inline ads, or sponsored content, or autoplaying videos, or any of the conventional web shenanigans that try to hijack your attention. They certainly can't track me. I can't speak to the digital side of the economist, as I do not use it, but the print ads are mostly for dumb luxury goods that I can easily ignore.

People paid for newspapers for decades, and they've definitely always had ads in them. The advertisers subsidize my news reading, and in this case at least the trade-off seems acceptable.

Ads without javascript are great, but they barely pay anything as it’s apparently harder to identify fraud.

Everything is moving, animated, etc. Blink was deprecated for a reason, it’s annoying. So is auto play, stickies, overlays, copy/paste interference, etc. The dark patterns make it miserable.

I agree that diversity of opinion is important! I made https://www.nabu.news for that exact reason. If I'm reading a NYTimes article and curious about what other sources might say, I just click on the Nabu browser extension to see what, for example, Fox News is saying about the same thing. Find it helpful for getting out of my echo chamber.

I think the side net thing would work better if there wasn’t so much garbage out there nowadays

> Why would you pay for something that has ads? It would be like paying facebook for a facebook account.

Or paying to go to live sports when everything has ads on it.

It's why I stopped watching football, baseball, basketball, etc. Used to be a huge sports addict. Such an incredible waste of time looking back. Now, I only watch ad free highlights, if that.

But peak level of lunacy are the ad-ridden movie trailers on youtube. I can't believe people are actually watching ads in order to watch an ad...

uBlock origin, haven’t seen an ad in years. The web is unusable without it.

Well, don't forget that people stayed in cinemas for ages after Marvel movies finished to see a teaser trailer for another Marvel movie.

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