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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Not only that but lwn is one of the main sites that gets submitted to HN all year round (not daily, but maybe nearish to daily). So the audience here on HN has been exposed to it over the years. I'm not sure what more they could do to get new subscribers, I certainly hope they figure that out or how to get new ways to earn revenue without having to go the ad route.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lwn.net

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I’m occasional lwn reader and I had no idea there are subscriptions there!

They lock down new articles for about a week I think, so subscribers get the first one, though if you're a subscriber I think they let you SHARE the article with others, so here on HN sometimes a brand new article will be shared by a subscriber with a code so anyone without a subscription can see it.

That's the thing though. You can get all the value from LWN through here. Even if it wasn't for them tolerating subscriber links being posted on HN, the week-long delay isn't nearly enough an incentive to actually subscribe, rationally speaking.

I think the generosity and straightforwardness are a big part of the attraction for many subscribers.

They've always respected their readers and I hope that continues to pay off.

Agree. I don't read it every week, but I greatly appreciate the quality (both of the technical content and the lack of advertising/sensationalism/clickbait) when I do read an article. Happy to pay to support this style of tech reporting and journalism.

Easy to say until they have to eventually make the hard decision to shut down.

Rationally-speaking, maybe not. I’ve been a long-time subscriber. When I first subscribed, my day-to-day involved embedded Linux and getting the “breaking news” was pretty valuable. These days I still do that somewhat but I’m stuck on a crusty vendor kernel and anything I read about a kernel newer than 5.15 is going to land on my desk in approximately 2028… but I still subscribe, mostly with a patronage mindset: I don’t acutely get value from the subscription every week, but I think it’s a community service and I’m happy to pitch in a few bucks to keep it alive.

Same as me. I started subscribing LWN when I was a Linux enthusiast from my early college days, because the content was so good and interesting. Nowadays I barely read it but I still keep my subscription alive, just because I think the content is worth it.

Wouldn’t rationally speaking you’d want to support them to keep them around? Or did you mean selfishly speaking?

not saying parent feels this way but the target class of this website often does not separate the two. we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism, i guess.

we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism

Are we though? I certainly don't sense the volume of FYIGM entitlement decreasing.

They literally fearmonger for a permanent underclass, it’s definitely not decreasing

(FYIGM = F* You, I Got Mine)

based on other replies to the parent, at least some folks feel differently :) but generally i'm not very optimistic about it.

Well for me, at least, it's those features that make me a subscriber. If not for those I wouldn't do it

Rationally speaking, if you're getting value from it, you should be interested in its continued existence and therefore subscribe.

Selfishly speaking is the word you were looking for.

This is why nobody likes economists.

TBF, economists, if any group, would understand the freerider problem and what it leads to if there are too many of them.

You’d think, but in practice their entire policy prescription seems to come down to “well if they didn’t want me to have it, they should’ve bolted it down, this is really an incentives problem, if you look at it.”

This is pretty close to "I shall stand under this tree during the storm to stay dry, and if this tree starts to drip on me I'll just run over to that other tree and stay dry there" thinking. If LWN goes away, that value leaves HN too. Rationally speaking.

Rational thinking includes thinking about the long term.

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