I'm fairly convinced by the argument that people never really paid for information/content a la (1), they paid for packaging. The problem in the digital age is

I'm fairly convinced by the argument that people never really paid for information/content a la (1), they paid for packaging. The problem in the digital age is that paywalls make the product worse. You can't link to it from HN or talk about it on whatsapp. Anyway, news has been funded by advertising since news for a while. What broke that model was when the internet made paper packaging irrelevant. This means that the "market" dynamics have always been weird. The news was a way of selling a stack of paper that had used car inserts hidden in it. Anyway, I don't think there are any obvious fixes. I do think the giant exaggerators need to admit that they're creating markets for information and consciously look to create better ones. For example, Google created a crap marketplace for content on youtube. It's encouraging spam. They should ditch it and start again, with the explicit goal of encouraging good content. That means they need to trust themselves to define good (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html