Exactly, just like I expect to get paid for my work. I want a simple way to pay for all the pay walls in aggregate so I'm not signing up for 27 different subscriptions and I read one article from each source. I'm not against paying, I'm against a huge pile of bullshit management.

The internet will also collapse when everything has turned into ad-optimized clickbait.

There is no shortage of brilliant people who are happy to share their creative work for free. Remember blogs and RSS? They were great. Static pages don't cost anything to host either.

I reject your false choice.

Most of the internet is duplicative crap, made way more easy to generate via AI now.

One person writes the article and 1000 people copy it.

The only way to solve that would be for Google to be smart enough to only link to original sources and not reposts.

Then at least we are rewarding original thinkers and could concentrate our attention (and money) there.

Those are far from the only options available. Recently platforms such as patreon have shown that it is completely feasible for a small subset of enthusiastic fans to financially support some creator that makes their content freely available to anyone with an internet connection. And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time, so acting like those people don't exist in spades just because a bunch of rent-seeking content farms have entered the field in recent years is ludicrous.

The problem is that paying is almost never anonymous, and there are still many places in the world where consuming the wrong text makes you a quasi-criminal.

We wanted music withóut paying for CDs.

Internet content is largely non exclusive and infinitely replicable.

Even the RIAA gave up and embraced the web, if begrudgingly.

Single edition single article news is simply a different type of good/product on the web. When publishers realise this and do what Spotify/QQ have done for pop music, then they'll get the additional revenue they seek.

The fundamental problem is that you can't unread an article if you don't like it, and get your money back.

A complicating factor: I think the people frustrated with Paywalls are often not browsing the website directly: A friend or relative sends you a link "hey check this out", or someone posts an article on a news aggregator site to spark discussion. You either hold the escape key after a refresh so you can chat with your mom about the article, or cut right to the comments section of the aggregator site and post something insightful based on the title.

The internet existed before paywalls or ads.

Maybe not in its current form where faang gets to make billions loads of services are free, but fundamentally it can exist

I have a feeling there's a but of point-missing going on. The authors are not really getting paid for their work; modern copyright is a get-rich-cheme for rights-holding corporations. (I write 13 books and netted a few hundred for it. All the rest was bagged by the publishers.) Resisting paywalls is not resisting the idea that the authors should get something for their work. It's resisting an double exploitation structure, where networks monopolize, enshittify, and bleed dry everyone they can get their hands on - authors, readers, advertisers, subjects, everyone. That this is so is easily shown_ take structures where the actual authors get paidm and people pay voluntarily. Patreon is still a fairly good example for this: people do their work, put it online for free, and people still pay for it (and some bonus content), for the joy of listening to it/watching it/whatever.

Boomers who don't know what ad block is can subsidize everything. They already own 50% of all the wealth.

The issue is the paywalls preventing access to information. Information should be available to everybody, regardless of whether or not they have the means to pay for it. Imo, it's best to have paid features that are not expected to be provided for free that helps pay for the free features or if going the advertisement route, make advertisements that are non-obtrusive and don't make the user's experience worse.