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Counterpoint - if you like the content enough to go through this - just pay for it. Monetary support of journalism or content you like is a great way to encoura

Counterpoint - if you like the content enough to go through this - just pay for it. Monetary support of journalism or content you like is a great way to encourage more of it.

ed 2y ago
I fully agree with the sentiment! I support and do pay for sources I read frequently. Sadly payment models are incompatible with how most people consume content – which is to read a small number of articles from a large number of sources.
naltroc 2y ago
as much as I circumvent paywalls myself, it does feel like overkill to setup software to do it always. Sites spend money to produce quality content. Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes?
- pjot 2y ago
  > Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content Probably so. I think the differentiation is in the scale at which scraping is done for those kinds of systems.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    It’s probably about the same. The difference with sites like e.g. Perplexity is that they have a business model which requires “acquiring” said content for free whereas a single person is just a single person.
- fwip 2y ago
  The neural network is not scraping content for its own purposes, it is for the purpose of the people who are running/training it. And yes, one person reading a piece of content without paying money for it is far, far better than one person/corporation scraping all of the world's content in order to profit off of it.
- latexr 2y ago
  > Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes? Here’s a similar comparison: “Is a human recording a movie at the theatre to rewatch at home really better than the one who shares the recording online?” Seeing as you’re calling it “theft”, presumably what you mean by “better” is “causes less harm / loss of revenue to the work’s author / publisher”. I’d say the answer is pretty clear. How many people go through the trouble of bypassing paywalls VS how many use LLMs? Saying “a neural network scraping content for its own purposes” doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. Setting aside the neural network is unlikely to be doing the scraping (but being trained on it), it’s not “for its own purpose”, it didn’t choose to willy nilly scrape the internet, it was ordered to by a human (typically) intending to profit from it.
setr 2y ago
Paying for it doesn’t make the site less miserable to use. One of the stupid things about piracy is that it tends to also be the best available version of the thing. You’re actively worse off having paid for it. (Ads, denial, DRM in general, MBs of irrelevant JS, etc don’t go away with money, but do with piracy)
- a1o 2y ago
  This right here. It would be nice to have some perk like you can read the articles through Gopher.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Case in point: paying for the New York Times doesn’t block ads in their app.
cortesoft 2y ago
I know of very few sites that let you pay to get zero ads or affiliate links. The ones that let you pay still show you affiliate links.
elondaits 2y ago
I agree, but would like for a way to pay for an article, or a single day, week, or month of access. Just like I could buy a single one-off issue of a publication a couple of times before starting a long term relationship with it. Not all publications support this, and some like the NY Times require chatting with a representative to cancel the subscription. I see a lot of talk about physical media around film and music, but not being able to buy single issues of any magazine or newspaper anonymously when the circumstances call for it, is a great loss for public discourse.
- cflewis 2y ago
  I feel like there were companies in the past that did try this, where you would chuck $5 or whatever in an account, and then each page you went to that supported the service would extract a micropayment from the account. Never took off. Should have done. e.g. in Santa Cruz there is https://lookout.co https://lookout.co , which is pretty good, but extremely pricy for what it is. There has to be a way between "pay and get everything", "ignore/go straight to 12ft.io".
jszymborski 2y ago
Countercounterpoint - Maybe I have news subscriptions for periodicals I regularly read, but don't feel like paying for a monthly subscription to read one random article from some news outlet I don't regularly read that someone linked on social media or HN.
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  ^ This describes my experience as well. And there are certain outlets where I'll read an interesting article if someone links it, but don't want to give them money due to my objection with <xyz> editorial practices.
- shanecleveland 2y ago
  So back out of the webpage and don't read it. That is a constructive way of letting a content producer know their user experience is not worth the "expense" of consuming their product. But if the content is worth your time and energy to consume, pay the "price" of admission.
  - cooper_ganglia 2y ago
    I back out of the webpage and go to 12ft.io, which allows me to both, read the article, while simultaneously using that constructive way of letting the publisher know that their product is not worth it's price.
    - shanecleveland 2y ago
      And then 12ft-dot-io throws an error, but still shows its own ad in the bottom right corner! But you probably knew that since you constructively use them.
  - gmiller123456 2y ago
    This assumes the their presence has no affect on me. It takes time to click a page and let it load, and more time to dig through all of the results when all of them are unreadable. Maybe if there were a tag like [ungodlyamountofads] on each, it would help. But even then I'd still have to scroll through them.
tomrod 2y ago
Pay walls don't get folks there, how ever noble the sellers of information they to brand it.
Teever 2y ago
Is there a way to pay for journalistic content that doesn't involve participating in the extensive tracking that those websites perform on their visitors? I love to read the news but I don't love that the news reads me.
- adamomada 2y ago
  I actually loled when I went to CNN with Little Snitch on, there were over one hundred different third-party domains it wanted to connect to
- Marsymars 2y ago
  > Is there a way to pay for journalistic content that doesn't involve participating in the extensive tracking that those websites perform on their visitors? Well you could buy physical newspapers/magazines. (Or access content via OTA TV / the library.)
ricardobeat 2y ago
It would cost me about $500/month if I subscribe to every paywall that appears in front of me.
shanecleveland 2y ago
100%. And sometimes that form of payment is putting up with ads, etc. I routinely back out of sites that suddenly take over the screen with a popup or take up large chunks with video or animations. Same as opting not to go in a particular store. But I also stick around and occasionally use products advertised to me. Shocking, I know.
Timpy 2y ago
I wasn't even thinking about paywalls, the first thing I did was check to see if cookie banners and "Sign in with Google" popups went away. There's so many user-unfriendly things that you constantly deal with, any amount of browsing is just a bad experience without putting up defenses like this.
cooper_ganglia 2y ago
I will never willingly give a journalist my money.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  I'm curious why. IMHO, they are true heroes.
- throw10920 2y ago
  Any journalist, or just specific journalists? Sure, the journalism industry is progressively being replaced by paid activists, but not all journalists are like this.
627467 2y ago
why pay a monthly subscription if we're going to be bombarded by legally required popups and other internal promotional stuff that hooks you to the site anyway?
notatoad 2y ago
I pay for the sites I visit regularly. But when somebody shares an article with me and I want to see what I’ve been sent, I’m not going to buy a $15 monthly subscription to some small-town newspaper in Ohio just because they’ve decided to paywall their content in that way.
bubblethink 2y ago
No. Paywalled content should not be indexed by search engines. The implicit contract I have with the search engine is that it is showing me things that I can see. The publishers and search engines pulled a bait and switch here by whitelisting googlebot. So it's fair game to view the publisher's website with googlebot. That's what the engineers spent their time working on. It would be unfair to let that go to waste.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  I dunno, it seems more like there should be a user-configurable setting to hide/show paywalled content. If you're looking for something, and it's only available behind a paywall (even a paywall you pay for!), how are you going to find it if it's not indexed?
- torgoguys 2y ago
  Yes, this. It is an affront to the open web to serve one set of content to one person and different content to someone else (unless there is a user experience benefit to the customization I suppose). I place most of the blame on the publishers for doing the bait and switch, but Google gets some blame too. They used to penalize website that sent googlebot different results (or at the very least they used to say that they penalized that). Now, they seem fine with it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
999900000999 2y ago
The Venn diagram of people who truly can't afford a New York times subscription, and even know what Docker is looks like two circles.
- GreymanTheGrey 2y ago
  Countries outside of the US exist, some of them with extremely low incomes that nevertheless hold segments of the population that are technically competent enough to not only understand what Docker is, but to use it on a regular basis.
  - yamazakiwi 2y ago
    The NYT is from the US so framing the question this way is not surprising and drawing the comparison of someone who can't afford NYT but knows what docker is, is interesting without your addition. There are other things we could mention like, maybe there are many people who can afford NYT but still don't want to pay for it, but that's not what we were talking about. That being said, thanks for the reminder about other countries... I'm sure everyone on HN forgot about globes.
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      You're also not entitled to free content. If this was a project to let you watch Netflix or ESPN without a subscription the discord around it would be much different. Is journalism really less valuable than Stranger Things.
      - yamazakiwi 2y ago
        I myself don't wish or want free content, I can create my own entertainment without the need of a large media corporation or a keyboard warrior spoon feeding me. I don't think comparing Journalism to Netflix or ESPN is relevant since they provide quality entertainment (at least in the minds of their base) vs Journalists who stretch out 2 bits of searchable information into a 10 page ad puzzle full of psychological poking. Yes, most journalism is less valuable than the critically acclaimed fantasy horror Stranger Things. This doesn't mean Journalism is less important or that good journalism doesn't exist. Honestly it's crazy to me Journalism doesn't see more critique. Most just sensationalize, fearmonger, and point fingers.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
I'll do that as soon as one-click-to-cancel becomes law. I refuse to subject myself to predatory business practices so they won't see my money until a legislative body starts working on behalf of the people.
dredmorbius 2y ago
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page. Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149. Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146. Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources. Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day. Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354> My alternative suggestion is global access to content through a universal content syndication tax, or fee assessed through ISPs, on a progressive basis. See: "Why won't (some) people pay for the news?" (2022) <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca41448a5b29e257 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...> Discussed 4 days ago on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571>
protocolture 2y ago
Counterpoint, meet me where I want to spend my money and I will. Not giving every publisher on the planet a sub.

Counterpoint - if you like the content enough to go through this - just pay for it. Monetary support of journalism or content you like is a great way to encourage more of it.

ed 2y ago

I fully agree with the sentiment! I support and do pay for sources I read frequently. Sadly payment models are incompatible with how most people consume content – which is to read a small number of articles from a large number of sources.

naltroc 2y ago

as much as I circumvent paywalls myself, it does feel like overkill to setup software to do it always. Sites spend money to produce quality content. Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes?

pjot 2y ago
> Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content Probably so. I think the differentiation is in the scale at which scraping is done for those kinds of systems.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  It’s probably about the same. The difference with sites like e.g. Perplexity is that they have a business model which requires “acquiring” said content for free whereas a single person is just a single person.
fwip 2y ago
The neural network is not scraping content for its own purposes, it is for the purpose of the people who are running/training it. And yes, one person reading a piece of content without paying money for it is far, far better than one person/corporation scraping all of the world's content in order to profit off of it.
latexr 2y ago
> Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes? Here’s a similar comparison: “Is a human recording a movie at the theatre to rewatch at home really better than the one who shares the recording online?” Seeing as you’re calling it “theft”, presumably what you mean by “better” is “causes less harm / loss of revenue to the work’s author / publisher”. I’d say the answer is pretty clear. How many people go through the trouble of bypassing paywalls VS how many use LLMs? Saying “a neural network scraping content for its own purposes” doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. Setting aside the neural network is unlikely to be doing the scraping (but being trained on it), it’s not “for its own purpose”, it didn’t choose to willy nilly scrape the internet, it was ordered to by a human (typically) intending to profit from it.

setr 2y ago

Paying for it doesn’t make the site less miserable to use. One of the stupid things about piracy is that it tends to also be the best available version of the thing. You’re actively worse off having paid for it. (Ads, denial, DRM in general, MBs of irrelevant JS, etc don’t go away with money, but do with piracy)

a1o 2y ago
This right here. It would be nice to have some perk like you can read the articles through Gopher.
janalsncm 2y ago
Case in point: paying for the New York Times doesn’t block ads in their app.

cortesoft 2y ago

I know of very few sites that let you pay to get zero ads or affiliate links. The ones that let you pay still show you affiliate links.

elondaits 2y ago

I agree, but would like for a way to pay for an article, or a single day, week, or month of access. Just like I could buy a single one-off issue of a publication a couple of times before starting a long term relationship with it. Not all publications support this, and some like the NY Times require chatting with a representative to cancel the subscription. I see a lot of talk about physical media around film and music, but not being able to buy single issues of any magazine or newspaper anonymously when the circumstances call for it, is a great loss for public discourse.

cflewis 2y ago
I feel like there were companies in the past that did try this, where you would chuck $5 or whatever in an account, and then each page you went to that supported the service would extract a micropayment from the account. Never took off. Should have done. e.g. in Santa Cruz there is https://lookout.co https://lookout.co , which is pretty good, but extremely pricy for what it is. There has to be a way between "pay and get everything", "ignore/go straight to 12ft.io".

jszymborski 2y ago

Countercounterpoint - Maybe I have news subscriptions for periodicals I regularly read, but don't feel like paying for a monthly subscription to read one random article from some news outlet I don't regularly read that someone linked on social media or HN.

spondylosaurus 2y ago
^ This describes my experience as well. And there are certain outlets where I'll read an interesting article if someone links it, but don't want to give them money due to my objection with <xyz> editorial practices.
shanecleveland 2y ago
So back out of the webpage and don't read it. That is a constructive way of letting a content producer know their user experience is not worth the "expense" of consuming their product. But if the content is worth your time and energy to consume, pay the "price" of admission.
- cooper_ganglia 2y ago
  I back out of the webpage and go to 12ft.io, which allows me to both, read the article, while simultaneously using that constructive way of letting the publisher know that their product is not worth it's price.
  - shanecleveland 2y ago
    And then 12ft-dot-io throws an error, but still shows its own ad in the bottom right corner! But you probably knew that since you constructively use them.
- gmiller123456 2y ago
  This assumes the their presence has no affect on me. It takes time to click a page and let it load, and more time to dig through all of the results when all of them are unreadable. Maybe if there were a tag like [ungodlyamountofads] on each, it would help. But even then I'd still have to scroll through them.

tomrod 2y ago

Pay walls don't get folks there, how ever noble the sellers of information they to brand it.

Teever 2y ago

Is there a way to pay for journalistic content that doesn't involve participating in the extensive tracking that those websites perform on their visitors? I love to read the news but I don't love that the news reads me.

adamomada 2y ago
I actually loled when I went to CNN with Little Snitch on, there were over one hundred different third-party domains it wanted to connect to
Marsymars 2y ago
> Is there a way to pay for journalistic content that doesn't involve participating in the extensive tracking that those websites perform on their visitors? Well you could buy physical newspapers/magazines. (Or access content via OTA TV / the library.)

ricardobeat 2y ago

It would cost me about $500/month if I subscribe to every paywall that appears in front of me.

shanecleveland 2y ago

100%. And sometimes that form of payment is putting up with ads, etc. I routinely back out of sites that suddenly take over the screen with a popup or take up large chunks with video or animations. Same as opting not to go in a particular store. But I also stick around and occasionally use products advertised to me. Shocking, I know.

Timpy 2y ago

I wasn't even thinking about paywalls, the first thing I did was check to see if cookie banners and "Sign in with Google" popups went away. There's so many user-unfriendly things that you constantly deal with, any amount of browsing is just a bad experience without putting up defenses like this.

cooper_ganglia 2y ago

I will never willingly give a journalist my money.

linsomniac 2y ago
I'm curious why. IMHO, they are true heroes.
throw10920 2y ago
Any journalist, or just specific journalists? Sure, the journalism industry is progressively being replaced by paid activists, but not all journalists are like this.

627467 2y ago

why pay a monthly subscription if we're going to be bombarded by legally required popups and other internal promotional stuff that hooks you to the site anyway?

notatoad 2y ago

I pay for the sites I visit regularly. But when somebody shares an article with me and I want to see what I’ve been sent, I’m not going to buy a $15 monthly subscription to some small-town newspaper in Ohio just because they’ve decided to paywall their content in that way.

bubblethink 2y ago

No. Paywalled content should not be indexed by search engines. The implicit contract I have with the search engine is that it is showing me things that I can see. The publishers and search engines pulled a bait and switch here by whitelisting googlebot. So it's fair game to view the publisher's website with googlebot. That's what the engineers spent their time working on. It would be unfair to let that go to waste.

Marsymars 2y ago
I dunno, it seems more like there should be a user-configurable setting to hide/show paywalled content. If you're looking for something, and it's only available behind a paywall (even a paywall you pay for!), how are you going to find it if it's not indexed?
torgoguys 2y ago
Yes, this. It is an affront to the open web to serve one set of content to one person and different content to someone else (unless there is a user experience benefit to the customization I suppose). I place most of the blame on the publishers for doing the bait and switch, but Google gets some blame too. They used to penalize website that sent googlebot different results (or at the very least they used to say that they penalized that). Now, they seem fine with it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

999900000999 2y ago

The Venn diagram of people who truly can't afford a New York times subscription, and even know what Docker is looks like two circles.

GreymanTheGrey 2y ago
Countries outside of the US exist, some of them with extremely low incomes that nevertheless hold segments of the population that are technically competent enough to not only understand what Docker is, but to use it on a regular basis.
- yamazakiwi 2y ago
  The NYT is from the US so framing the question this way is not surprising and drawing the comparison of someone who can't afford NYT but knows what docker is, is interesting without your addition. There are other things we could mention like, maybe there are many people who can afford NYT but still don't want to pay for it, but that's not what we were talking about. That being said, thanks for the reminder about other countries... I'm sure everyone on HN forgot about globes.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    You're also not entitled to free content. If this was a project to let you watch Netflix or ESPN without a subscription the discord around it would be much different. Is journalism really less valuable than Stranger Things.
    - yamazakiwi 2y ago
      I myself don't wish or want free content, I can create my own entertainment without the need of a large media corporation or a keyboard warrior spoon feeding me. I don't think comparing Journalism to Netflix or ESPN is relevant since they provide quality entertainment (at least in the minds of their base) vs Journalists who stretch out 2 bits of searchable information into a 10 page ad puzzle full of psychological poking. Yes, most journalism is less valuable than the critically acclaimed fantasy horror Stranger Things. This doesn't mean Journalism is less important or that good journalism doesn't exist. Honestly it's crazy to me Journalism doesn't see more critique. Most just sensationalize, fearmonger, and point fingers.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

I'll do that as soon as one-click-to-cancel becomes law. I refuse to subject myself to predatory business practices so they won't see my money until a legislative body starts working on behalf of the people.

dredmorbius 2y ago

As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page. Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149. Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146. Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources. Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day. Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354> My alternative suggestion is global access to content through a universal content syndication tax, or fee assessed through ISPs, on a progressive basis. See: "Why won't (some) people pay for the news?" (2022) <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca41448a5b29e257 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...> Discussed 4 days ago on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571>

protocolture 2y ago

Counterpoint, meet me where I want to spend my money and I will. Not giving every publisher on the planet a sub.