Going a step further, I think google should stop crawling websites that are paywalled. When I search for something, I want to see results that I can click on. Not some snippets from NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg and others which are heavily paywalled.
Could there be a way to sustainably make enough money from visitors without making it all suck?
1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
And where it's impossible to tell difference from a (pseudo) random stream of numbers.
Well, sure. Who pays for it?
I disagree. I think there's a lot of it out there, in the form of blogs and small forums. It's just really hard to find, like mining for gold in the Super Pit [1]. You need to sift through mountains of rubble to find tiny amounts of gold.
[ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to access
For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000 services, the experience would probably be horrible. The internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a good business model if you want to make a living.
Sad but true. The closest we have to a solution right now is PressReader, which is just too expensive in my opinion at $30 per month.
With trusted third parties or block chains, the transaction costs are unfortunately much, much higher, especially initially without proper scales economics.
But a lot of work and planning would be needed to get anywhere with such an idea.
My definition of "best" includes my ability to actually read the content under my terms.
Cost has nothing to do with determining the quality of a search result, and search engines shouldn't discriminate against paywalled content. But I think it's a good idea to let users like you check a box to hide paywalled results.
Long gone are the days of "surfing the web", when most of us spent our time online just randomly browsing around.
I've come to learn that many people on hacker news have an ethos of never paying for digital content or services. Most people here make an hourly salary of $20 or more in my estimate, yet they will spend days and days of their time to avoid paying $5 for something. So you spend $100-$200 of your time to save $5. What's the rationale?
It reminds me of my travels around the world, where I'd hang out with backpackers that would spend a long time in the supermarket looking for the cheapest noodles, instead of spending their time enjoying the exotic location they were in. Or spent half the day walking along the highway to a bus stop instead of taking a taxi that would cost $5.
I think it is fair that a search engine by default should be unbiased and look for the best result for the query, and not account for price or such.
No, I won't answer my mommas house because you can't just show up and eat there as a restauraunt. It doesn't fit the search criteria you asked for.
If you ask what the best restauraunt in town is, I'll give you a restauraunt.
If you ask what the best restauruant in town is, I won't send you to a place where you can buy a "best restauraunts in town guide" for 5 bucks, because that's not what you're asking for.
Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.
If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.
2. Just because you paid at the paywall, doesn't mean you have to subscribe for life. You can pay to get the information you need and then instantly cancel any subscription.
> If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that.
PressReader is pretty much this, although the price is $30 and not $20.