You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality
mcsweeneys.net
mcsweeneys.net
* https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/
* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to.
But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all the $2.50 or $5.00 subs? I feel like we anchor to $10 because it's a nice easy number, but the average person just can't afford very many of these, and no single subscription is good enough. So we sustain our desire to not pay for anything.
I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.
EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html
Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform.
Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs.
EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.
In any case, the tax status of a payment (donation or payment for goods/services received) would most likely be orthogonal to that, i.e. I don't think you could skirt any of these requirements just by saying you're taking donations.
We've not already tried blockchain for this. The rails are there, just a small matter of implementation. Everyone's too busy building shovel factories and not enough people are mining for gold to make a web3 micropayments product.
I can, right now, buy $5 of solana on Coinbase, give you $0.05, with an inconsequential fee of $0.001 or so using Solana, and with enough $0.05 payments, you can cash it out via Coinbase. It works on web on desktop via a chrome extension, I'm still working out a solution for mobile.
I'd love to have an Internet reading budget for the month and have that automatically get disbursed to the writer if I read past a certain point in the article. The rails are all there, just a small matter of code and then getting adoption.
More technical points I can think of: how fast do transactions get confirmed (If they have to wait 5 min to read a news article most people will go somewhere else)? If this becomes more popular, what stops processing fees from going up (I think this is a problem for BTC).
Anyway, Phantom*, with Solana can do micropayments today, on mobile and desktop, it's just a small matter of coding and adoption. Transactions take 5 seconds, which isn't awesome, but is stomachable. Gas fees are fixed at 0.00015 SOL, which then varies with the exchange rate, but that's currently (Jun 2024) $0.02. This does mean it will go up as the price of SOL goes up, but, well, it's not 2016, so I don't know that anyone's expecting wild swings in the exchange rate. I am not a cryptocurrency economist though. (Nor a regular one, for that matter.)
The supported golden happy path for this is anybody who can buy Solana, which would include a US person with a Coinbase account, who's willing to install their Chrome extension. The problem is mobile. The platform I'd like to support is Safari on iOS with a Safari extension, so it's seamless, but that's not there yet. What's there is to install a new app and use that app to browse, which I guess isn't the worst thing.
That's all technical implementation details though, the real barrier to adoption is getting writers/authors to use this. You'd have to setup a medium/substack clone, get a bunch of content producers on it, and then get readers will appear. But once you're there, then anyone else can setup a clone and cut you out of the picture. In fact, that's the whole point, that in using Solana as the base currency, people aren't tied into your platform. So then what's the incentive for setting up the medium/substack clone if the whole point of your clone is that people don't need it. So there's no VC-level funding to build this thing because there's no VC-level payout, but you're out there competing with well funded firms for talent to build this thing.
* https://phantom.app/ (non-affiliated)
Money handling is expensive.
Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example.
As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.
Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges.
Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.
Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per year means that you need roughly $100 each in profit in order to support that programmer. A thousand transactions in a month means you need roughly $10 profit each to support that programmer. You need 10K transactions per month before you are at $1 profit per transaction to support your programmer.
How many businesses have ten thousand transactions a month? Not very bloody many. Basically, only the very top 50 out of 250K creators (0.02%!) on Patreon pass that mark. It's REALLY rare.
Sure, when you are at scale things are cheap. However, before then things are very expensive.
And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer.
If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.
You definitely don't need an engineer dedicated to monetary transaction flows. We use Braintree and haven't had an engineer touch it more than once a year in the past 4 years.
if you want to go engineering free, shopify has subscription plugins that can handle everything for $20-$80/month...
I feel like your comment is from 10+ years ago, back before competition led to payment processors becoming a commodity... has it been a while since you've looked?
Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!
The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested)
K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.
This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.
This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...
Dang and this whole time I’ve been deciding which content I value and then paying for it.
Apparently this usually still resolves to the same page but the browser treats it as a different domain with separate cookies and localStorage, so it would bypass the limit, but if you kept doing it then it'd probably accumulate free articles still and stop working
at which point one could perhaps try visiting example.com../page
All that to say, no, you sadly can't add another trailing dot.
Edit to add: if you have web services that are resolved via DNS, it may be a performance advantage to configure clients with the trailing dot. A lifetime ago we ran into intermittent latency issues when some DNS resolvers would try to search before checking the canonical entry.
If they didn't check host headers, then no, the browser would not send the cookies for google.com, since the browser has no idea about your DNS changes and is only looking at the domain name itself.
I could use more browser dumb things like this.
Like when the browser won't ever forget that you once visited an HSTS server at this domain and now+forever won't let you visit the http server (at the same domain).
I also find it goes against the ethos of HN to try to prevent a user from controlling their own hardware... if I want to MITM myself, I should be able to.
Saw that a few days ago but I don't do Chromium browsers. Cest la vie.
Appreciate the attempt.
Or
let map = HashMap::from_iter([
"www.domain.com.": Cookiebag::new(),
"www.domain.com": Cookiebag::new(),
]);Or use a client that does not implement cookies, localStorage or Javascript, like the original www browsers. I have been using these for decades.
In the relatively rare case I have to use a popular, graphical browser distributed by an entity that collects users' data to support online ad services, on a network I do not control, I use Javascript site settings and/or UBlock Origin. But that is far more complicated, more resource intensive and slower compared to using a simpler client and a localhost-bound forward proxy. Plus I am at the mercy of third parties: 1. the advertising-supported company distributing the browser and 2. the "browser extension" developer.
Most times, I am making HTTP requests with TCP clients, not a browser. If I am using an HTTP client, I use tnftp with custom modifications, fetch, or some other small client I can easily modify. I use a localhost-bound TLS forward proxy. Thus I can use a wide assortment of old TCP and HTTP clients from years when software was less bloated. For example, I still use orginal netcat heavily on a daily basis.
When I retrieve HTML/JSON/CSV, I use small, simple UNIX filters I write myself to extract what I want and present it in a readable text-only format and/or insert it into a SQLite3 database. I like the sqlite3 text-only output formats.
Hitting a limit on the number of news articles I can read is not something I am personally familiar with, and I use the same news websites as the people who complain about this, hence I believe it is associated with the browsers they are using, not the websites.
I operate in textmode, no graphics. There are few benefits I get from the use of HTML without useful hyperlinks.
In such cases, using a browser is unecessary, overkill. I use a pager instead.
The pricing was surprisingly low, $5/month can eliminate ads on most of the websites that I view, while the owner will not have a reduced ads revenue.
Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues. Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction prefered by their owners. In the US, most small towns have newspapers owned by the leading families. The paper is valuable to that family if it's being read by the locals and the paper making money is nice but secondary.
GOOD content, though, is expensive to make, and while the creators would absolutely love it if everyone read it, their primary need is the ability to keep producing it. There are fewer billionaires paying to keep them in business, and if there were, they'd mostly likely start falling into being the bad kind of content.
So you end up in this situation where all of the true, high qualify information is behind paywalls, and all the bullshit propaganda masquerading as information is freely available to all.
My own town (60,000+) lost its paper more than ten years ago.
Was that not the general experience?
That said, my small town's paper is going strong - it serves two cities of 12,000 and 3,000 people in a county of a little less than 100K.
I don't.
My life is better for letting it go. If something is genuinely important, and I really need to know - I always end up finding out somehow.
However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news. For certain vulnerable groups, keeping up to date with politics and the news might have a tangible impact in their everyday life.
With that being said, I generally don't keep up with the news either.
Well, the other issue is that people pay too much attention to national news and waaaay to little attention to local news.
That fracking site that just opened up next to your farm should probably occupy your attention. The four slobs trying to bring fiber to your town need your support. The fact that your local sheriff's office is swinging around with military gear might be a bit of a concern. etc.
Sure, you want to make sure you are paying attention to whether the fascists are trying to take over nationally, however, those same people can do a lot more direct damage to you by taking over local control.
I don't read articles about autocrats or mass shootings or whatever because I don't enjoy them, and me reading them doesn't make the world a better place.
If the local bridge is closed due to X people tell you.
On paper there are some semimonthly environmentalist magazines my wife subscribe to, and the news coverage in those is quite settled and nice in that way. I guess magazines would be the place to look, but those seem to be dying off or are losing quality...
Techdirt does analysis https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=techdirt.com
Prospect Magazine does yesterday's journalism https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/
RetroReport does event postmortem videos https://retroreport.org/
For particularly brilliant writers (ex: https://duck.com/?q=Kashmir+Hill https://duck.com/?q=Zeynep+Tufekci), I'll see where else they're writing. Sometimes that turns up mags I don't know about.
Work Slack at 10pm.
Your kids having phones at school 'just in case.'
People upset you didn't text them back for last minute dinner plans.
Something beyond first world problems at this point. Things I'm not even allowed to reject or resist. (I do resist.)
nowadays it seems we are notified when sitting in front of a computer.
I didn't find out about OK City until the following Monday, driving back to classes.
I was playing hookey from something and watching the Challenger launch at home. So I caught that one.
In fact I need to dig out my ancient ipad and see if it will run on there still. One more reason to put my phone down.
"All your other friends couldn't come either because you don't have any other friends. Because of how unlikable you are."
We are not worthy.
For example, there are a few youtubers who do a great job but their appeal is global - or at least the entire english speaking population. The scope of focus is “interesting conspiracies that are true” or “some product everyone wants”. Not a serious investigation into the misallocated funds in the local county.
(2) People psychologically struggle with paying for something non tangible.
The online advertising merchants realized they could "curate" and "summarize" the articles, resulting in far fewer ad impressions than if someone had to find things purely through the publication newspaper, and bring the ads forward to their portal instead of solely on the content itself.
AND they capitalized on an early reluctance to charge for things online to push the "ew, who wants to pay" mindset globally.
Newspapers didn't understand that their own business model wasn't two separate modes of "journalism" and "advertising" until it was too late. They were always in the relevant information (both news and advertising) business, so Google SUPER ate their lunch. Many news organizations died and some limp along not knowing this, but the industry as a whole was fat and complacent. There was a lot of money in newspapers, especially before it was legal to own multiple news sources. Local newspapers being able to fly reporters to major national events type of money (in private jets for the larger ones).
I spent a few years at one of the larger surviving independent statewide papers in the US as part of a team specifically hired to "fix" the subscriber and advertiser losses. They told us the scope was business-wide, but in reality all leadership wanted was someone to tell them that they're smart, special people who just need to use manipulative tactics harder. Nonprofit and community focused papers are springing up, and doing well, but some old timers are holding out for something around the corner that will magically return them to 1000%+ profit margins instead of learning how to be a normal business since they missed their chance to be Google.
It's not the web. It's democratization. And unfortunately, people would rather watch dancing cats then pay someone to tell them what their local county is doing. That's called consumer choice and fighting it is like fighting nature.
There is more to it than wanting free stuff. At least for some of us.
I have never subscribed to newspapers. If I wanted one, I would go to the convenience store or find a newspaper box. Why? Newspapers sold subscriber lists. I realized early on that online news sites would do the same, only they would have far more valuable data: they would know what interested me from what I read. So instead of being the target of advertising, I would be the target of targeted advertising.
(It also doesn't make sense from a convenience perspective. Newspaper subscriptions offered convenience through home delivery. News sites offer the, admittedly minor, inconvenience of managing accounts.)
Like why not lay the smack down to all the illegal shit exposed by the panama papers, and put the money toward real investigative journalism outfits? Oh right because there are no consequences, and if there were they would never put the money in the right place.
we are a technically skilled bunch and find ways around it. but is there a scope to inject advertizing into the "content" (i.e. the article) in a similar way youtube is experimenting with video (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660464)?
The strange thing was, the article I read was almost verbatim to the one I had just read on CNN.
Maybe they both just copied from the AP? I dunno how these things work.
It is fun to compare how different news source report the same story.
You can't copyright facts and journalism belongs to the people not to the institutions that are capable of publishing editorials at scale.
Another angle: prose and code describe facts using slightly different languages, but would you say that code (or institutions capable of publishing code at scale) shouldn't exist or that they should "belong to people" (what does that mean anyway?)
No, what I'm saying is, the existence of institutions that can publish at scale has no impact on whether individuals can do it or not. I can write code whether Google exists or doesn't. In that sense it belongs to individuals.
Sometimes it’s just not directly paid (most commonly: ad-supported journalism), or even paid for by the journalist with their time and opportunity cost of not selling it to somebody that does charge for it (blogs etc.)
If none of these are applicable, chances are it’s PR, not journalism.
Absolutely. Journalism takes time. Good journalism takes a lot of time.
I would agree that it takes very little time to parrot LEO/Gov/Corp press releases.
It takes much more time to vet that PR for accuracy, truthfulness and historical context - and then chase down all the rabbit holes that get turned up and compile enough info to craft an understandable story.
It does suck that the first option gets chosen like 100-1 over the 2nd.
There is never, ever going to be an equivalent case with big tech ("Google V Sullivan") because Google does care what happens to youtube creators, and they are not liable because thanks to section 230 they are not a publisher. Google do not care if any youtuber get sued out of existence by the government or the powerful. Same for Wikipedia, Wikipedia is never going to be involved in a major free speech case because thanks to section 230 they have no legal liability for what others post on their site. Same for Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, all of them. Big Tech media has absolutely zero protections for any of the journalism done on them.
That is why big cases like Weinstein are still done by the NYT and The New Yorker.