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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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