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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

Publishing in a newspaper gets you distribution and a permanent record. After one day access was also virtually free.

Going behind a paywall is a reduced distribution over what an individual can easily access, and the content is no longer permanent but subject to whatever the publisher chooses to keep providing.

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It’s in The Atlantic. There’ll be a copy in the Library of Congress. You’ll be able to read it for free in any dentist’s waiting room for the next six months.

> You’ll be able to read it for free in any dentist’s waiting room...

Methinks that this says quite a lot about your socioeconomic situation. I've not seen The Atlantic in a dentist's waiting room.

The Atlantic is only found in exclusive high end doctor's offices?

I don’t think I have seen a real print copy of The Atlantic in my entire life fwiw lol

It would never occur to a rich person that paying for a newspaper subscription could be considered friction, much less a problem.

I'm sure it would to a great many of them. The money would be insignificant, but there's a congnitive overhead that you had to have a subscription so that paying for it becomes thinking about that becomes friction even while the cost is insignificant. Like, hm, am I willig to just forget about it and let it charge forever so I can read this one article, do I care enough to remember I have a subscription to the site in the future, can I read the one thing and cancel on the spot, will that work? blahblah. To be sure, I'm sure some quite wealthy people could be completely unbothered by it, but I think it's far from a foregone conclusion simply by the price being insignificant for them--the subscription is a mental non-monetary transaction, you have to take at least a small mental journey of being an 'x' subscriber in a sense, and that's friction

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