5 ms·

I think it mostly comes down to having way too much cognitive overhead. All the options I've seen presented just require far too many value decisions too freque

I think it mostly comes down to having way too much cognitive overhead. All the options I've seen presented just require far too many value decisions too frequently. Once nice bundle I can be quite sure of is just requires so much less thinking. It's even better because I can frame it in my head as exchanging money for a physical thing, and then I can do whatever I want with that physical thing - including ignore it. Micropayments really suffer from this constantly. So much so that I think the value of the content goes negative once you factor in the costs to decide if you want to pay for it and then the costs of paying for it (mostly not monetary costs). Individual subscriptions (aka Patreon) bulk them all together at once and will just keep happening so you better keep on top of them. The main alternative that doesn't quite suffer from this is the model of a single payment that gets smeared automatically across everything. I chuck in $X/month and it gets automatically distributed to all the sites I've visted somehow. I think this suffers from different problems. Namely that I probably don't want to pay in proportion to time spent or pages viewed but value. My money would probably end up largely going to the big companies and not so much to the little guys, while I'd probably personally choose the opposite proportions. And other times there are websites you've visited that you definitely don't want to give money to, because they managed to SEO their utterly useless page into your search results, or whatever. So now you have to go deal with that, or else pay them for troubling you. And then before long you've gotten so deep into engineering how this payment gets distributed that you're practically at the level of micropayments anyway. And then you start considering things like privacy, or issues with payment processors caring about content and... it all just gets far too messy.

Gravityloss 5y ago
At least you could have reputable aggregators or "raters" for these kind of articles.
- dash2 5y ago
  Absolutely! You could have a single aggregator which selects different articles and publishes them. It would stake its reputation on the quality of its journalism. Writers would compete to get into the best aggregator. This is a great idea. Needs a name. How about "newspaper"?
ghaff 5y ago
You probably would need to get to some sort of aggregator with either a fixed or max monthly fee. The problem at that point is that no one who can attract a significant number of subscribers on their own will participate. Imagine a newspaper/magazine subscription that the NYT, WSJ, Post, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Atlantic, etc. don't participate in. And then you have the streaming video issue. Aggregator A has this writer but not that writer, etc.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate. What's different about news and music is that there's not so much interest in the back catalog in news. So publishers could have less power than record companies. Regarding streaming, again, that's only a problem if there is exclusivity.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    >The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate. You do have that with syndicated columns, cartoons, wire service copy, etc. Although the NYT uses less of that sort of content than many papers do.
    - Gravityloss 5y ago
      Yes, but not from a consumer point of view. If I want to read those AFP and Reuters stories, I still have to go to a select small paywalled garden, ie I can't get all of them with one monthly payment. It's a different topology from Spotify and Apple Music.

Gravityloss 5y ago

At least you could have reputable aggregators or "raters" for these kind of articles.

dash2 5y ago
Absolutely! You could have a single aggregator which selects different articles and publishes them. It would stake its reputation on the quality of its journalism. Writers would compete to get into the best aggregator. This is a great idea. Needs a name. How about "newspaper"?

ghaff 5y ago

You probably would need to get to some sort of aggregator with either a fixed or max monthly fee. The problem at that point is that no one who can attract a significant number of subscribers on their own will participate. Imagine a newspaper/magazine subscription that the NYT, WSJ, Post, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Atlantic, etc. don't participate in. And then you have the streaming video issue. Aggregator A has this writer but not that writer, etc.

Gravityloss 5y ago
The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate. What's different about news and music is that there's not so much interest in the back catalog in news. So publishers could have less power than record companies. Regarding streaming, again, that's only a problem if there is exclusivity.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate. You do have that with syndicated columns, cartoons, wire service copy, etc. Although the NYT uses less of that sort of content than many papers do.
  - Gravityloss 5y ago
    Yes, but not from a consumer point of view. If I want to read those AFP and Reuters stories, I still have to go to a select small paywalled garden, ie I can't get all of them with one monthly payment. It's a different topology from Spotify and Apple Music.