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Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But,

Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price. Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk. You could even list the names of the sponsors of the article when it gets unlocked (if they didn't want to be anonymous). How cool would be to one of the people who helped an important story "break"?

juris 8mo ago
that is an incredible idea and i would support you with code should you or anyone else decide to make that happen
DennisP 8mo ago
That seems like a really great idea.
ted_bunny 8mo ago
What about crowdfunding bounties for information to be publicly released? We all have some big questions and I'd gladly pay into them if it worked.
shimman 8mo ago
Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving. Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.
- tehjoker 8mo ago
  Organizing is often less about convincing people that are in hard opposition and more about moving ppl that are pro, soft or uninformed. Then moving those people to take actions that advance the ball in their own interests or the interest of allies. You can really only move people that are hard against when the stakes are low and they have no ideological commitment against what you are suggesting. Getting someone to change ideologically is a slow or impossible process that comes from changes in social position and inner changes.
  - shimman 8mo ago
    This isn't true in my experience as a party operator at all. You can easily move MAGA to progressive quite simply, do some deep canvassing but you'll find out that there are more agreements that people care about (healthcare costs, housing costs, poor salaries, poor retirement, decaying society) where you can build on top of. Also what you're saying goes against the most effective union advice from people like Jane McAlevey that have successfully implemented strikes with >95% participation rates and getting workers effectively everything they ask for. Want to know how she is able to achieve this? She talks to those that people respect and follow in the workplace, often these people are at odds against you. In her books she has given example after example on how she would convert people that were leading the anti-union efforts into being pro-union joining the cause. Sorry man, just because your organizational skills are terrible doesn't me that there aren't real effective ways to do this.
    - tehjoker 8mo ago
      Those people weren't ideologically against you on housing, healthcare, or poor salaries etc. If they were, you wouldn't be able to convince them. The reason they were easier to move is because of their class position. If you talked to a business owner, they would be against improving many of those things, particularly poor salaries and retirement. Healthcare keeps employees tied to work too. With workers, there isn't an economic interest against changing those positions. With a business owner there is. I'm sure you understand this since you are talking about unions. In the taxonomy I described, I would categorize the people you're talking to as "soft" or "uninformed" because you are encouraging them to take action in their own interest.
AceJohnny2 8mo ago
FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow). It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.
- setupminimal 8mo ago
  It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely. Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
mitthrowaway2 8mo ago
I really like this idea for a lot of reasons, but especially the last one. It seems like it creates an incentive model that's much closer to rewarding quality investigative journalism rather than the viral junk that ad-driven business models incentivize. But there is room for it to go wrong, so it would have to be designed carefully. For example it's still vulnerable to the same rage-bait incentive that ad-driven services are, where people decide that articles that make them angry or afraid, or which make their ideological opponents look evil, are more worth spreading (and therefore more worthy of paying to unlock for the crowds). There's probably no perfect defence against this, but there's at least one option where the kickstarter contract can be structured so that the payments get returned if the article is later found to be factually incorrect in some major aspect. Then at least there's a pull towards truth, even if it's still rage-inducing. Of course, this model also incentivizes the writing of articles that groups with more buying power are more likely to want to spread, so the wealthier blocs will shape the narrative... but when has the world ever been otherwise.
chongli 8mo ago
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price. What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public. I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
- munificent 8mo ago
  > Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public. Right, but micro level difference matters here. If a middle-class person can help an important story reach an audience, that's helpful for democracy. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, it isn't. This is also why I think suggesting it work like a kickstarter where multiple people can pool money to unlock an article would be helpful. It naturally collects the will of many people in a democratic way.
  - chongli 8mo ago
    This is basically political fundraising, where rich people signal-boost their preferred candidate and help them attract lots of donors from the public. I think the fundamental piece you're missing is the Pareto principle. In any popularity contest, the most attention accrues to the most popular. This naturally leads to a power law distribution in popularity.
    - judahmeek 8mo ago
      I'm actually wondering if Citizens United will prove to be a stabilizing force. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary-cornyn-paxton-hunt-crockett-talarico https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary... shows that, in this year's Texas race, the centrists are getting more funding than the culture warriors even though the culture warriors are more popular. Granted, that's only a single data point.
popalchemist 8mo ago
That would incentivize locking important things behind paywalls.
AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The thing that best approximates what you're asking for and is likely to work (i.e. doesn't need micropayments) is the "free to read" substacks. Anyone can read them, and anyone can pay to subscribe, and if enough people subscribe so that the authors can make rent, they keep writing. The hardest part about either one is that it requires altruism and then people are often accosted by insufficiently schooled wannabe intellectuals who tell them that being altruistic is irrational. Meanwhile human beings would otherwise intuitively understand that once your basic needs are met, valuing the common good more than personal consumption of hedonistic luxury products is a perfectly rational thing to do, until someone comes along to lecture them on what they should want and try to make them feel stupid for wanting something better.
raincole 8mo ago
> I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. > ...I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. Propagation is free; quality journalism is premium. An interesting idea, nonetheless. However, in the end, I really don't believe any serious article ever moved the needle of an election. The kind of news that actually make people vote is "(identity) of (skin color) killed (another identity) of (another skin color) brutally," not some analysis over the economical consequence of the cease of Fed independence.
snthpy 8mo ago
Great point and good idea. Maybe something like the Kickstarter model, where you commit to paying something and it only gets deducted if enough people commit? You'd probably still want to read it straight away rather than wait so you'd pay a small amount for immediate access and commit an additional amount for public access if the threshold is reached. The public commitment could come at the bottom of the article, once you've decided that it's on the public interest.
- ikr678 8mo ago
  Counterpoint, you'v just changed publishing incentives. If I write 10 public interest stories, but notice a particular topic is making me more $$, I'll focus in on that. You could end up with bad actors/PR management types promoting particular stories constantly or to detract from investigation they want less public.
  - snthpy 8mo ago
    Thanks. I always like putting my ideas out there as I often get feedback on points I hadn't considered. On this leading to reporting being pushed more towards what people consider in the public interest, I would argue that's a good thing. It's also maybe not that different to the current status quo if you look at how different TV or news networks cater to one target market or another. With regards to your second point, sounds like you're essentially describing a Sybil attack. I agree with you that that's a serious concern. I'm just going to think aloud here so not sure where I'll end on this but let's see: 1. Having to make a micropayment for each upvote will at least put some cost to the bad actors, cf spam email vs spam SMS. That still makes it more amenable to abuse by the rich but I guess in the end it would come down to the balance of economic power and interest/participation between the masses and the elites? 2. How does it compare to the current model? You pay for a monthly subscription which in this context is an undifferentiated portfolio bundle of the news stories of a particular month. I guess that does make the cost of a Sybil attack higher because you can't just spend on the particular other stories trending at the same time as the one that you are currently trying to bury. For the good actor consumer this means that they generally have to pay for/support a news organisation that is broadly aligned with their interests or ideology. It does create this cliff effect though in that if I don't think I'll read enough stories in a particular month to justify my subscription then I won't pay for it at all. 3. I guess this mirrors the kind of debate and thought that's been going on in decentralized blockchain and web3 circles over the past decade or more about how to structure incentives that create broad distributions of power without too much concentration. I'm not up to speed on that so would love it if someone more knowledgeable would weigh in. 4. I had a thought about tying subscriptions to real world identities of natural persons but I don't like that from a privacy and censorship perspective. 5. I was reminded of Quadratic Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting) which I believe would work well if there is a limited set of participants but I think won't protect you from a Sybil attack when it is cheap to create identities. 6. Building on points 5 and 4, what about this? You need a decentralized digital identity in the form of a DID which would have to be signed by some trusted party, either a government or some other institution. This could still be anonymous or pseudononymous in that when you go to the authority to have it signed, the signing authority checks that you currently don't have another active identity or any previous ones have been revoked (potentially problematic as I'm guessing the authority would have to maintain a link and I don't know if that's possible in a zero knowledge way). Alternatively identities are unlimited but expensive to create, say something like $1000 a piece so that creating 1M fake ones at least costs you $1bn. It's yours for life though so you can amortize the cost over time. In order to not cut out people at the bottom of the income distribution, they can use the government signed one but they lose the benefit of anonimity. 7. Once you have something like 6 then maybe QV is a good mechanism for apportioning micropayments on stories in the public interest? Anyway, would love to know what current SOTA on this is in web3 circles rather than my speculations over my morning coffee.
Twisell 8mo ago
The system you describe is already implemented at least on this French independent media "Arrêt sur Images". Subscribers can vote to gift articles to the public. (I'll link Wikipedia as a proxy to avoid HN hug of DDOS https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images English version has not been updated so recently)
exe34 8mo ago
Elon musk and Peter Thiel will just pay for all the conspiracy theories.
Folcon 8mo ago
You're basically describing the Random Model by Greg Stolze[0] Basically someone creates a work and puts a price on it and then like with Kickstarter asks people to fund it, however after it's funded it becomes public and is released into the public domain -[0]: unfortunately I can't find the original article, but this covers gist of it https://caffeineforge.com/2012/11/26/the-ransom-model/ https://caffeineforge.com/2012/11/26/the-ransom-model/
wvh 8mo ago
Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.
- munificent 8mo ago
  > Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? What do you think happens now?
TuringNYC 8mo ago
>> Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. This sort of happens with Substack, albiet not as explicitly. People become "Founding Sponsors" or "Paid Subscribers" and they effectively subsidize it for everyone else because they appreciate the author's work and want the author to succeed. Authors often want to give away the content since it is indeed better if everyone can read it (as you note) -- but often cannot sustain it without a minimum set of sponsors. I think you are speaking about this happening at the article level rather than publication level, which seems pretty hard since the readership would be fractured and long-tailed.
friendzis 8mo ago
> This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. > And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk. There are at least two additional emergent properties: 1. That would essentially put a ceiling on revenue per article. 2. Articles close to the unlock threshold would be much more likely to get funding, opening huge space for manipulation.
troyvit 8mo ago
What if you did like The Guardian, but writ small, and just suggest how much the article is worth after a person read it. Often when I read something really good I have a bit of a high at the end of it, real gratitude for the writer(s) and others who put it together. I wouldn't mind if that feeling was monetized.
JR1427 8mo ago
> Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. So then only rich people get to decide what they make available for free to poor people. I don't think this is adding anything new to the way the world already works.
- DennisP 8mo ago
  That's how it works now. This way regular people have some say instead of no say.
jasonlotito 8mo ago
> Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. Ignoring the millionaire angle of just paying for salaries, we sort of already have that. It's the algorithm of whatever platform a person is on. The net result is people focusing on things that get the most eyeballs. The problem with your vision is literally what you are saying: > I'm fine with paying for that article Sure. But what about the one before that? And the one after that? Articles that don't meet your standards that you would say you are fine paying for. It's like asking to pay a programmer per line of code that goes into the actual final build. Unit tests? Nope. Integration tests? Nada. Comments? Nope. Documentation? Are users paying for it? No? No way! This sounds ridiculous because it is. And you already work this way. You lump stuff people don't care about with stuff people do care about and combine them. It's the old joke about paying by the hour vs. by the project, and how you aren't paying for the 15 minutes of work it takes an expert to do something, but for the 20 years of experience that allow them to do it in 15 minutes. > I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price. I think that could work in a way. I think it's a bit more involved than just buying an article. Back of the comment thinking here: you see an article you like, you buy a year subscription. This signals that sometimes articles take longer to write, that the person writing that article can't write good articles if they are stressed, and that they avoid having to only ever chase trends. Then, by having that sub, you have votes. These are effectively "tipping" with your subscription. You don't pay more; you just signal that you want this article to be free. If enough people "tip" on this article, it goes free. Does this work? I don't know. I feel like in this case, it's low enough to be feasible but not too low as to diminish the work. I think people who claim they are willing to pay for the article will show their true colors and balk at the price. Ignoring that the article is more than just the lines of text and the time it took to type it out.
ishanmahapatra 8mo ago
There’s the “unlocking the commons”[0] model used by Tim Carmody and Craig Mod. [0]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/
estimator7292 8mo ago
Donate to your local library. This is the entire point and purpose of the public library system: aggregating resources to provide accessible information and entertainment for local communities. Your local library almost certainly has subscriptions to several online and physical news sources. Typically larger libraries have physical newspaper subscriptions from across the country. If you want to improve accessibility for everyone while still keeping publishers paid, donate to your local library and tell everyone you know about the services they offer. Seriously, we already have a nationwide system to provide access to information that not everyone can afford. We don't need to invent something new and more complicated.
- 1123581321 8mo ago
  It’s a nice sentiment (librarianship runs in my family) but there are still issues with accessibility for library institutional subscriptions, compared to easily shared links. Relying on institutional subscriptions for revenue isn’t enough for the publishers and journalists. It’s also hard to target donations towards certain parts of the collection; at most libraries almost none of your donation would go towards periodicals. None of these problems are unsolvable, but typical libraries would need to significantly change their focus and invest in new shared technology first. I do recommend contacting circulation, reference or technology direction to share your desire to see the library play a larger role in making journalism accessible to the community.
PaulRobinson 8mo ago
I've thought about doing this with software: "I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it". Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait. Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.

juris 8mo ago

that is an incredible idea and i would support you with code should you or anyone else decide to make that happen

DennisP 8mo ago

That seems like a really great idea.

ted_bunny 8mo ago

What about crowdfunding bounties for information to be publicly released? We all have some big questions and I'd gladly pay into them if it worked.

shimman 8mo ago

Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving. Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.

tehjoker 8mo ago
Organizing is often less about convincing people that are in hard opposition and more about moving ppl that are pro, soft or uninformed. Then moving those people to take actions that advance the ball in their own interests or the interest of allies. You can really only move people that are hard against when the stakes are low and they have no ideological commitment against what you are suggesting. Getting someone to change ideologically is a slow or impossible process that comes from changes in social position and inner changes.
- shimman 8mo ago
  This isn't true in my experience as a party operator at all. You can easily move MAGA to progressive quite simply, do some deep canvassing but you'll find out that there are more agreements that people care about (healthcare costs, housing costs, poor salaries, poor retirement, decaying society) where you can build on top of. Also what you're saying goes against the most effective union advice from people like Jane McAlevey that have successfully implemented strikes with >95% participation rates and getting workers effectively everything they ask for. Want to know how she is able to achieve this? She talks to those that people respect and follow in the workplace, often these people are at odds against you. In her books she has given example after example on how she would convert people that were leading the anti-union efforts into being pro-union joining the cause. Sorry man, just because your organizational skills are terrible doesn't me that there aren't real effective ways to do this.
  - tehjoker 8mo ago
    Those people weren't ideologically against you on housing, healthcare, or poor salaries etc. If they were, you wouldn't be able to convince them. The reason they were easier to move is because of their class position. If you talked to a business owner, they would be against improving many of those things, particularly poor salaries and retirement. Healthcare keeps employees tied to work too. With workers, there isn't an economic interest against changing those positions. With a business owner there is. I'm sure you understand this since you are talking about unions. In the taxonomy I described, I would categorize the people you're talking to as "soft" or "uninformed" because you are encouraging them to take action in their own interest.

AceJohnny2 8mo ago

FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow). It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.

setupminimal 8mo ago
It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely. Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.

mitthrowaway2 8mo ago

I really like this idea for a lot of reasons, but especially the last one. It seems like it creates an incentive model that's much closer to rewarding quality investigative journalism rather than the viral junk that ad-driven business models incentivize. But there is room for it to go wrong, so it would have to be designed carefully. For example it's still vulnerable to the same rage-bait incentive that ad-driven services are, where people decide that articles that make them angry or afraid, or which make their ideological opponents look evil, are more worth spreading (and therefore more worthy of paying to unlock for the crowds). There's probably no perfect defence against this, but there's at least one option where the kickstarter contract can be structured so that the payments get returned if the article is later found to be factually incorrect in some major aspect. Then at least there's a pull towards truth, even if it's still rage-inducing. Of course, this model also incentivizes the writing of articles that groups with more buying power are more likely to want to spread, so the wealthier blocs will shape the narrative... but when has the world ever been otherwise.

chongli 8mo ago

I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price. What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public. I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.

munificent 8mo ago
> Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public. Right, but micro level difference matters here. If a middle-class person can help an important story reach an audience, that's helpful for democracy. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, it isn't. This is also why I think suggesting it work like a kickstarter where multiple people can pool money to unlock an article would be helpful. It naturally collects the will of many people in a democratic way.
- chongli 8mo ago
  This is basically political fundraising, where rich people signal-boost their preferred candidate and help them attract lots of donors from the public. I think the fundamental piece you're missing is the Pareto principle. In any popularity contest, the most attention accrues to the most popular. This naturally leads to a power law distribution in popularity.
  - judahmeek 8mo ago
    I'm actually wondering if Citizens United will prove to be a stabilizing force. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary-cornyn-paxton-hunt-crockett-talarico https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary... shows that, in this year's Texas race, the centrists are getting more funding than the culture warriors even though the culture warriors are more popular. Granted, that's only a single data point.

popalchemist 8mo ago

That would incentivize locking important things behind paywalls.

AnthonyMouse 8mo ago

> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The thing that best approximates what you're asking for and is likely to work (i.e. doesn't need micropayments) is the "free to read" substacks. Anyone can read them, and anyone can pay to subscribe, and if enough people subscribe so that the authors can make rent, they keep writing. The hardest part about either one is that it requires altruism and then people are often accosted by insufficiently schooled wannabe intellectuals who tell them that being altruistic is irrational. Meanwhile human beings would otherwise intuitively understand that once your basic needs are met, valuing the common good more than personal consumption of hedonistic luxury products is a perfectly rational thing to do, until someone comes along to lecture them on what they should want and try to make them feel stupid for wanting something better.

raincole 8mo ago

> I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. > ...I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. Propagation is free; quality journalism is premium. An interesting idea, nonetheless. However, in the end, I really don't believe any serious article ever moved the needle of an election. The kind of news that actually make people vote is "(identity) of (skin color) killed (another identity) of (another skin color) brutally," not some analysis over the economical consequence of the cease of Fed independence.

snthpy 8mo ago

Great point and good idea. Maybe something like the Kickstarter model, where you commit to paying something and it only gets deducted if enough people commit? You'd probably still want to read it straight away rather than wait so you'd pay a small amount for immediate access and commit an additional amount for public access if the threshold is reached. The public commitment could come at the bottom of the article, once you've decided that it's on the public interest.

ikr678 8mo ago
Counterpoint, you'v just changed publishing incentives. If I write 10 public interest stories, but notice a particular topic is making me more $$, I'll focus in on that. You could end up with bad actors/PR management types promoting particular stories constantly or to detract from investigation they want less public.
- snthpy 8mo ago
  Thanks. I always like putting my ideas out there as I often get feedback on points I hadn't considered. On this leading to reporting being pushed more towards what people consider in the public interest, I would argue that's a good thing. It's also maybe not that different to the current status quo if you look at how different TV or news networks cater to one target market or another. With regards to your second point, sounds like you're essentially describing a Sybil attack. I agree with you that that's a serious concern. I'm just going to think aloud here so not sure where I'll end on this but let's see: 1. Having to make a micropayment for each upvote will at least put some cost to the bad actors, cf spam email vs spam SMS. That still makes it more amenable to abuse by the rich but I guess in the end it would come down to the balance of economic power and interest/participation between the masses and the elites? 2. How does it compare to the current model? You pay for a monthly subscription which in this context is an undifferentiated portfolio bundle of the news stories of a particular month. I guess that does make the cost of a Sybil attack higher because you can't just spend on the particular other stories trending at the same time as the one that you are currently trying to bury. For the good actor consumer this means that they generally have to pay for/support a news organisation that is broadly aligned with their interests or ideology. It does create this cliff effect though in that if I don't think I'll read enough stories in a particular month to justify my subscription then I won't pay for it at all. 3. I guess this mirrors the kind of debate and thought that's been going on in decentralized blockchain and web3 circles over the past decade or more about how to structure incentives that create broad distributions of power without too much concentration. I'm not up to speed on that so would love it if someone more knowledgeable would weigh in. 4. I had a thought about tying subscriptions to real world identities of natural persons but I don't like that from a privacy and censorship perspective. 5. I was reminded of Quadratic Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting) which I believe would work well if there is a limited set of participants but I think won't protect you from a Sybil attack when it is cheap to create identities. 6. Building on points 5 and 4, what about this? You need a decentralized digital identity in the form of a DID which would have to be signed by some trusted party, either a government or some other institution. This could still be anonymous or pseudononymous in that when you go to the authority to have it signed, the signing authority checks that you currently don't have another active identity or any previous ones have been revoked (potentially problematic as I'm guessing the authority would have to maintain a link and I don't know if that's possible in a zero knowledge way). Alternatively identities are unlimited but expensive to create, say something like $1000 a piece so that creating 1M fake ones at least costs you $1bn. It's yours for life though so you can amortize the cost over time. In order to not cut out people at the bottom of the income distribution, they can use the government signed one but they lose the benefit of anonimity. 7. Once you have something like 6 then maybe QV is a good mechanism for apportioning micropayments on stories in the public interest? Anyway, would love to know what current SOTA on this is in web3 circles rather than my speculations over my morning coffee.

Twisell 8mo ago

The system you describe is already implemented at least on this French independent media "Arrêt sur Images". Subscribers can vote to gift articles to the public. (I'll link Wikipedia as a proxy to avoid HN hug of DDOS https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images English version has not been updated so recently)

exe34 8mo ago

Elon musk and Peter Thiel will just pay for all the conspiracy theories.

Folcon 8mo ago

You're basically describing the Random Model by Greg Stolze[0] Basically someone creates a work and puts a price on it and then like with Kickstarter asks people to fund it, however after it's funded it becomes public and is released into the public domain -[0]: unfortunately I can't find the original article, but this covers gist of it https://caffeineforge.com/2012/11/26/the-ransom-model/ https://caffeineforge.com/2012/11/26/the-ransom-model/

wvh 8mo ago

Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.

munificent 8mo ago
> Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? What do you think happens now?

TuringNYC 8mo ago

>> Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. This sort of happens with Substack, albiet not as explicitly. People become "Founding Sponsors" or "Paid Subscribers" and they effectively subsidize it for everyone else because they appreciate the author's work and want the author to succeed. Authors often want to give away the content since it is indeed better if everyone can read it (as you note) -- but often cannot sustain it without a minimum set of sponsors. I think you are speaking about this happening at the article level rather than publication level, which seems pretty hard since the readership would be fractured and long-tailed.

friendzis 8mo ago

> This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. > And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk. There are at least two additional emergent properties: 1. That would essentially put a ceiling on revenue per article. 2. Articles close to the unlock threshold would be much more likely to get funding, opening huge space for manipulation.

troyvit 8mo ago

What if you did like The Guardian, but writ small, and just suggest how much the article is worth after a person read it. Often when I read something really good I have a bit of a high at the end of it, real gratitude for the writer(s) and others who put it together. I wouldn't mind if that feeling was monetized.

JR1427 8mo ago

> Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. So then only rich people get to decide what they make available for free to poor people. I don't think this is adding anything new to the way the world already works.

DennisP 8mo ago
That's how it works now. This way regular people have some say instead of no say.

jasonlotito 8mo ago

> Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. Ignoring the millionaire angle of just paying for salaries, we sort of already have that. It's the algorithm of whatever platform a person is on. The net result is people focusing on things that get the most eyeballs. The problem with your vision is literally what you are saying: > I'm fine with paying for that article Sure. But what about the one before that? And the one after that? Articles that don't meet your standards that you would say you are fine paying for. It's like asking to pay a programmer per line of code that goes into the actual final build. Unit tests? Nope. Integration tests? Nada. Comments? Nope. Documentation? Are users paying for it? No? No way! This sounds ridiculous because it is. And you already work this way. You lump stuff people don't care about with stuff people do care about and combine them. It's the old joke about paying by the hour vs. by the project, and how you aren't paying for the 15 minutes of work it takes an expert to do something, but for the 20 years of experience that allow them to do it in 15 minutes. > I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price. I think that could work in a way. I think it's a bit more involved than just buying an article. Back of the comment thinking here: you see an article you like, you buy a year subscription. This signals that sometimes articles take longer to write, that the person writing that article can't write good articles if they are stressed, and that they avoid having to only ever chase trends. Then, by having that sub, you have votes. These are effectively "tipping" with your subscription. You don't pay more; you just signal that you want this article to be free. If enough people "tip" on this article, it goes free. Does this work? I don't know. I feel like in this case, it's low enough to be feasible but not too low as to diminish the work. I think people who claim they are willing to pay for the article will show their true colors and balk at the price. Ignoring that the article is more than just the lines of text and the time it took to type it out.

ishanmahapatra 8mo ago

There’s the “unlocking the commons”[0] model used by Tim Carmody and Craig Mod. [0]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/

estimator7292 8mo ago

Donate to your local library. This is the entire point and purpose of the public library system: aggregating resources to provide accessible information and entertainment for local communities. Your local library almost certainly has subscriptions to several online and physical news sources. Typically larger libraries have physical newspaper subscriptions from across the country. If you want to improve accessibility for everyone while still keeping publishers paid, donate to your local library and tell everyone you know about the services they offer. Seriously, we already have a nationwide system to provide access to information that not everyone can afford. We don't need to invent something new and more complicated.

1123581321 8mo ago
It’s a nice sentiment (librarianship runs in my family) but there are still issues with accessibility for library institutional subscriptions, compared to easily shared links. Relying on institutional subscriptions for revenue isn’t enough for the publishers and journalists. It’s also hard to target donations towards certain parts of the collection; at most libraries almost none of your donation would go towards periodicals. None of these problems are unsolvable, but typical libraries would need to significantly change their focus and invest in new shared technology first. I do recommend contacting circulation, reference or technology direction to share your desire to see the library play a larger role in making journalism accessible to the community.

PaulRobinson 8mo ago

I've thought about doing this with software: "I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it". Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait. Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.