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Journalism needs to be paid for. The open information you want is often unreliable, unverified and amateur. Yes, of course you can point to the vlogs of Sabine
by tgv 4y ago
Journalism needs to be paid for. The open information you want is often unreliable, unverified and amateur. Yes, of course you can point to the vlogs of Sabine Hossenfelder, but she won't tell you about the problems with review sites or the tensions in German politics over Ukraine, nor tell you about the James Webb telescope in easy words, nor review the latest Marvel movie. You know who will tell you that for free? Breitbart (). And why? Because someone else pays them to push an agenda. Don't be their enabler.
() Breitbart is just one example. An ugly one, though.
- erik_seaberg 4y agoThere are thousands of separate paywalls out there, so if the HN front page is full of paywalled links, most of us won’t be able to read any of them. This might make sense if there were a tech wire service we agreed on using.
- tgv 4y agoYou have a point. Perhaps there should be a rule that paywalled links can only be submitted with a (user-written) summary? Does take away a bit from the paper's income, though.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoOften the papers are doing the same, they're taking the information from a third-party that actually did the journalism. Yes, there's value in aggregation, which is why tech news sites mostly just use Reddit to harvest stories from a week or so after they appear. IMO that's very low value. If the "news" sites wanted to encourage reward for sources they could start by attributing every story and indicating who they paid and the originator of the factual data. Truly though most of them would seemingly rather we paid them whilst they just regurgitate a social news site.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoNotably, Brave browser somewhat solves this with a system of attention tokens that can be used to distribute micro payments.