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Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

By this logic, listings for physical products shouldn't show in search results either, because they're just ads for something you have to pay for.

You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.

This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.

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Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.

I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.

I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.

Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.

I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.

It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.

As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.

Prob easier to manage a month’s worth of subscriptions than write a single paragraph of one good article (spoken as someone with a subscription allergy personally!). Darn I feel bad for journalists, almost wish physical newspapers were just about our everything so we paid a few bucks for 1-2 things and felt the products in our hands. I think that status quo was OK for the industry (or maybe journalism has never been a decent business, but seemed OK).

I would be a lot less reticent to try subscriptions if cancellation were always a standard one-click affair. It’d also help if it were the norm for companies of any kind selling subscriptions to notify you before trials, promotional periods, etc are going to end instead of keeping silent and hoping you forget.

Remembering to cancel subscriptions that I wasn’t enthused with and figuring out the mystic ritual required to cancel are types of stress I don’t need any more of.

The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.

I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.

> I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog

I don't like paywalls but this is very silly. You have exactly the same tools to evaluate products and blogs: reviews. You wanna figure out if you should pay for The Information? Go lookup a reddit thread on if it's worth it[1].

Also what "tactics"? Being indexed by a search engine? Nefarious!

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/venturecapital/comments/142ulk7/the...

I’m not likely to go on a side quest to look up reviews on a site I stumble upon in search of information. There’s a decent likelihood that the nugget I came for is either the only thing I need from the site or the site is something I’d use a small handful of times per year at most.

There’s “tactic” being used here is bait and switch.

The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.

Don't they? An ice cream maker might be highly ranked because of positive reviews from people who used it to make good ice cream, yet clicking through to the product page doesn't let me have ice cream unless I buy the machine!

Now imagine clicking through to the product page, and in order to view information about the product, you must pay first.

Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).

Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.

(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).

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