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That's the topic of an essay I'd written a couple of years ago and just discussed on HN last week: "Why won't (some) people pay for the news?" <https://diaspo
by dredmorbius 2y ago
That's the topic of an essay I'd written a couple of years ago and just discussed on HN last week:
"Why won't (some) people pay for the news?"
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca41448a5b29e257 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571>
Upshot: Numerous legitimate reasons. I'd very much like to see universal syndication / superbundling on a distributed progressive tax and/or ISP tollkeeper basis, with some additional details for the fiddly bits.
As for subscribing to content submitted to general discussion sites, such as HN or others:
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the HN 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>
(Source: own work based on scraping the HN front-page archive from initiation through June 2023.)
- protocolture 2y ago>ISP tollkeeper ISPs are terrifying organisations I wouldnt wish this system on the world. Everything else you said makes sense.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago>ISPs are terrifying organisations Could you explain why?
- dredmorbius 2y agoAt least in the US, most: 1. Are monopolies. 2. Don't care if you live or die. 3. Have a long sordid history of despicable practices, including price gouging, rampant upselling, shoddy customer service, manipulating search and Web results, selling customer browsing history or patterns, and worse. 4. Are typically at or near the top of lists of companies / industry sectors with which the public trusts least and hates most. They have enormous power over individuals, collect absolute gobs of data, and act capriciously, carelessly, and overwhelmingly against their subscribers' personal interests with it.
- protocolture 2y agoMostly because they see themselves as invisible, have basically no security posture, and are often either operated by the owner, or by a bunch of foreign tech support goons who have unlimited access to your data.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'm not suggesting this out of any sense that they are good-faith participants in society or even commercial space. They are however the one point of authenticated and payment-based contact between all Internet users and the greater cloud. So if there's going to be some form of payment, it's highly likely to come either from the ISP or some collection of government-imposed fees or taxes. The latter could come at multiple levels, e.g., a city, county, state, or federal levy.
- protocolture 2y ago>They are however the one point of authenticated and payment-based contact between all Internet users and the greater cloud. Yeah but we need to diminish their contact with authentication and payments. They have little to no understanding of security. Like you might be thinking "Oh just have comcast do this" and they could probably cobble something together with only a massive data breach once in every 5 years. But think about all the guys in the sticks dealing with Joe Blogs Wisporium or Texas Petes flying internoobs. These solo operators often cant work out telephony or iptv. Having them middleman payments for an extra tax or service is a huge extra risk. I am not even super comfortable with them holding PII or Credity cards as it stands.
- akvadrako 2y agohttps://www.pressreader.com https://www.pressreader.com has 7000 publications for $30 a month. I get it free by visiting my library once a week.
- dredmorbius 2y agoOddly enough, we created this thing called the Internet and World Wide Web on the premise that data comes to people and not the other way 'round.