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Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t know. It’s almost like people need to get paid for their work. The real question is why do you feel so entitled that you believe that you should get everything for free?

Here's the issue, if you wanted to read every interesting article posted to HN on a given week who would have to be subscribed to 15-20 different paid services... which I'm sure you'll agree is ridiculous.

Currently I subscribe to Disney+ and Amazon Prime only, because I was only using Netflix for maybe two hours per week and for me, that's not worth the price.

If I use the same logic for online magazines and newspapers, there is no online text content that I use for more than two hours per week and as such, the ridiculous subs prices make no sense to me. Also, it's highly likely I would end up subscribing to say NYT, and then that week all I really want to read is something on Forbes or Bloomberg and nothing on NYT, or a similar scenario. There is too much fragmentation and the value proposition just isn't there. It's like there were 15 different streaming services with content roughly divided between them.

Sure people need to make a living but the current model just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I was "rich" I would just pay for every text based publication out there, but I'm not, and paying for something I use so little makes no sense.

Can you please let me know where in the following error message I'm getting I can find the instructions to pay the WSJ?

> You have been blocked.

> Why? Something about the behaviour of the browser has caught our attention.

> There are various possible explanations for this:

> You are browsing and clicking at a speed much faster than expected of a human being.

> Something is preventing JavaScript from working on your computer.

> There is a robot on the same network IP as you.

You know what the error message means, you've decided to use a non-fully-featured browser to visit their webpage. It's like taking the wheels off of your car and then complaining that your immobile vehicle isn't eligble for the drive-thru lane at a restaurant.

They have a print edition that you're welcome to buy from any local store that sells newspapers.

I'm sorry, I'll tell Mozilla that Firefox is non-fully-featured right away.

HN doesn't seem to mind it, I don't see why showing me a bunch of text is such an insurmountable technical challenge for a website.

Also, to continue the car analogy, it's more like turning your headlights off and the drive-through complains that your car is nonstandard and won't let you order.

Why would you tell Mozilla that? Their firefox browser works just fine with WSJ, both to display articles and to subscribe to their digital offerings.

As is nearly always the case: the user is at fault.

To fix the car analogy that you maliciously broke, it's like a car that you took the engine out of, and then complain that it doesn't drive. But if anyone asks why your car is broken, you weirdly pretend that you didn't take the engine out of it, and make asinine statements about how "it has wheels, why doesn't it roll" knowing full well why it doesn't.

You don't even know anything about my browser, yet you insist that it's somehow broken for accessing websites. Whatever.

That's false. I know several things about your browser based on what you've said:

- You get errors saying that your browser doesn't support javascript.

- You're using Mozilla Firefox, which fully supports javascript

- The WSJ website works with up-to-date Mozilla Firefox out of the box

This means you've broken or tampered with Firefox using an extension or setting, or perhaps have some other strategy to disable javascript.

So what's happening here? It's either:

1. You know exactly what is happening: you disabled javascript and you're wasting everyone's time with a weird game where you pretend to be stupid

2. You are very low-skill in this area and have no idea what you've done or why

I assumed "1" because "2" is pretty unlikely for a user on this forum and quite mean to assume.

I paid for that, I buy stuff all the time and companies are taking some of that money for their ad budgets and send it to websites so that they can use it to finance their content. It is nice of them that they are not only using my money to finance content I want to see but as an added bonus also want to make me happy with flashy ads, but I do not want to see those, so I block them.

I have subscribed to Japantimes, only to find out it uses a 3rd party integration - piano.io, I can’t access the content I’ve paid for without enabling 3rd party tracking. Worse the JWT token has my name and email address in it (base64).

Then realized that paying makes me more targeted. I can just buy a newspaper at any kiosk without a subscription and it doesn’t have cookies in it.

Is it ok if he/she says its for ML training? :-)

Because, frankly, most of this content is very cheap. As in the value of these 'news' is zero and often negative.

These are not starving journalists trying to reveal the 'truth'. These are big corporate entities peddling a lot of fast food content and the agenda of their shareholders/sponsors. The 'real' journalists (if such a thing still exists) who work there get paid peanuts compared to how much they squeeze from the millions of readers through these anti patterns.

Now that they built this huge ship, they have to keep producing content just to keep it afloat, regardless of whether there's any value in it for the readers. Most of the time there is none. Important news will reach you without any paywalls.

I don't feel entitled, in fact I don't really care about TFA. The link was posted to HN and then immediately someone commented with a archive link, because the original link is not working for most of the people here who never pay for news, because they know better.

But the WWW is now broken for everyone because of this.

If you have a better solution to the problem of making journalism financially viable I'm sure a lot of people would be very interested to hear it.

Micro payments, I might want to pay some small amount for this one article but not subscribe to the whole publication.

This has been tried many times and nobody has been able to make it work. What would you do differently?

if that were an economical model for the Wall Street Journal, they would do it.

the truth is that microtransactions would cannabilize their existing subscriber base more than raise revenue.

Yup. I'd pay 10-20 cents. And if i could pay $1-$2.00 for a good article to let the next 5-10 ppl read it on me i'd do that too.

Journalists need to eat and advertising-funded websites rely on people clicking on the adverts and spending money.

People are strangely reluctant to do this.

As we all know, the true reason people don't buy stuff from online adverts is that the adverts just aren't loud, visible and obnoxious enough.

If we make it literally physically impossible to look at anything else or navigate away, people will buy some of what we're peddling.

Journalists don't need to eat though. They can be replaced by fully automated open source and free AI news agent self loops run by volunteer computation resources.

If they're going to exploit our attention and refused implement free and open source newsagents on their own, but instead extort us for subscriptions and steal our attention with unwanted ads, then we have no choice but to displace them with our own free and liberated solutions to the news problem.

Their time is marked.

Yeah, it would be great if this was integrated in browsers :)

PS: I'm ok with paying for news, but not like this.

I'm not okay with paying with news. If I have to pay with news by losing attention, it is far better to simply have no news.

Who the heck cares what Boeing did this or that if it requires guzzling a hot steamy load of ads or purchasing a subscription. I definitely don't want that.

This is part of why user operated independent and free and open source AI news agents are going to make things a lot better.

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