4 ms·

You can’t force people to value what journalists produce and the reality is most people don’t value it, like at all. Most people simply aren’t going to pay, so

You can’t force people to value what journalists produce and the reality is most people don’t value it, like at all. Most people simply aren’t going to pay, so articles/sites might as well go behind a hard, credit card and login enforced paywall at this point. That way only those who pay can get access, there’s no workarounds, any republished articles can be easily DMCA’d, and republishers can be banned/sued. Easy to bypass soft paywalls are going to be bypassed no matter what publishers/writers do, so it’s time to take a harder stance. If their content is economically viable they’ll be fine. Frankly I was legitimately hoping this would be the viable use case for crypto. Allow a JS miner to run while you read and the profits go to the publisher. Like everything else crypto it was a dead on arrival idea thanks to bad actors.

arp242 4y ago
I do think people value it, even the people railing against the "lamestream media" or whatever they call it these days value journalism as a concept, which is why sites like Breibart and such exist. I suspect many people are also willing to pay; the thing is that it's just hard to compete with free: why pay when you can get the same (or something very identical) for free? It's kind of a race to the bottom.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
Journalism in my country dumped the early internet formula and are now behind paywalls. They are making a profit. In rich countries there has always been and always will be an elite that values and can pay for information. Subscription is an old model that has proven to work for centuries. The government official working at the foreign office reads a quality newspaper. Media almost commited suicide when they adopted the advertising model.