5 ms·

That's a really shitty outcome tho. Look at how toxicly inaccessible academic papers are. Universities pay exorbitant prices for their students and faculty, and

That's a really shitty outcome tho. Look at how toxicly inaccessible academic papers are. Universities pay exorbitant prices for their students and faculty, and no normal person could every afford it. What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000) cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of those articles split that money based on how highly the user rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10 articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10 articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100 articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly, since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality content and disincentivizing click bait. Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save us. This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many different news sources to be supported by subscription services without massively fragmenting what people can read (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented what people can watch).

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I don't think you can charge per article. It makes opening a new article too high-stakes; people don't want to think about spending money each time they click on something, even if the amount they're spending is super small. I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.
- billytetrud 5y ago
  Just like no one wants to think about spending money each time they turn on a light in their house or take a shower? Yes, it'll be a barrier for people for a week, and then they'll forget about it like everything else we pay for individually. > your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Micropayment startups have come and gone. I agree with you that pay-as-you-go has been normed with electricity, water, and probably even gas for cars. But maybe it's because people feel they need to do those things for some definitions of need. Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment. Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
    - billytetrud 5y ago
      > Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc). > Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions. Music has been an interesting outlier here because people are increasingly listening to music playlists and not hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that because they're activities that generally require engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the background while doing something else. The movement towards the subscription model has primarily been about improving things for businesses, not for customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think about paying", but we can clearly see countless counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like the subscription model because it makes it easier for them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small) barrier in place for customers to stop paying them. However, while the subscription model is great for single items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model for networks of content when you think about what it incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than another user both pay the same price. This means it necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and raises the price for people who consume a below average amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there. In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options. In fact, there is an incentive to release low-quality content as filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming service for example. If they increase the number of options available to customers, they don't earn any more money but each item available in the system gets watched less, which means owners of the content would would to be part of that subscription network less and less as the content grows. Either that or they charge customers more as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for since most people wouldn't actually consume more just because the library's bigger. What results is that video subscription services have necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as long as people keep drooling over the subscription model. People are locked into one or two networks of content which are primarily all they watch. They don't have access to other content without paying significantly more or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one network and beginning with another (which loses them access to content they had there). News is even worse, where individual newspapers have their own siloed subscription services. That's great if you read most of the content on there, but its terrible if you just want to read an article someone sends you ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news services that have come out recently, but these will also have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has because of the subscription model.
Barrin92 5y ago
High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW), NPR in the US I believe, in reality you don't need to pay for news at all if you're an ordinary citizen who just wants to stay on top of what's going on. If you're some kind of think tank employee and read four hours of news per day surely you can afford it. Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW), NPR in the US I believe ... In the US, there simply isn't enough quality news available for free, and many essential stories and reporting are behind paywalls (especially the NYT and Wash Post).
- billytetrud 5y ago
  > Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks. Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to spend more time reading things to be well informed, or we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more entertainment than journalism. > High quality public news is also still available Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid their time being wasted by garbage articles and click bait. This is the price we're paying.
  - seanp2k2 5y ago
    https://apnews.com/ https://apnews.com/ uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads. Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.
    - 5y ago

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I don't think you can charge per article. It makes opening a new article too high-stakes; people don't want to think about spending money each time they click on something, even if the amount they're spending is super small. I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.

billytetrud 5y ago
Just like no one wants to think about spending money each time they turn on a light in their house or take a shower? Yes, it'll be a barrier for people for a week, and then they'll forget about it like everything else we pay for individually. > your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Micropayment startups have come and gone. I agree with you that pay-as-you-go has been normed with electricity, water, and probably even gas for cars. But maybe it's because people feel they need to do those things for some definitions of need. Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment. Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    > Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc). > Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions. Music has been an interesting outlier here because people are increasingly listening to music playlists and not hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that because they're activities that generally require engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the background while doing something else. The movement towards the subscription model has primarily been about improving things for businesses, not for customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think about paying", but we can clearly see countless counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like the subscription model because it makes it easier for them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small) barrier in place for customers to stop paying them. However, while the subscription model is great for single items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model for networks of content when you think about what it incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than another user both pay the same price. This means it necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and raises the price for people who consume a below average amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there. In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options. In fact, there is an incentive to release low-quality content as filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming service for example. If they increase the number of options available to customers, they don't earn any more money but each item available in the system gets watched less, which means owners of the content would would to be part of that subscription network less and less as the content grows. Either that or they charge customers more as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for since most people wouldn't actually consume more just because the library's bigger. What results is that video subscription services have necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as long as people keep drooling over the subscription model. People are locked into one or two networks of content which are primarily all they watch. They don't have access to other content without paying significantly more or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one network and beginning with another (which loses them access to content they had there). News is even worse, where individual newspapers have their own siloed subscription services. That's great if you read most of the content on there, but its terrible if you just want to read an article someone sends you ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news services that have come out recently, but these will also have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has because of the subscription model.

Barrin92 5y ago

High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW), NPR in the US I believe, in reality you don't need to pay for news at all if you're an ordinary citizen who just wants to stay on top of what's going on. If you're some kind of think tank employee and read four hours of news per day surely you can afford it. Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.

wolverine876 5y ago
> High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW), NPR in the US I believe ... In the US, there simply isn't enough quality news available for free, and many essential stories and reporting are behind paywalls (especially the NYT and Wash Post).
billytetrud 5y ago
> Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks. Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to spend more time reading things to be well informed, or we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more entertainment than journalism. > High quality public news is also still available Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid their time being wasted by garbage articles and click bait. This is the price we're paying.
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  https://apnews.com/ https://apnews.com/ uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads. Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.
  - 5y ago