this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Journalism has become an absolute dumpster fire for almost anyone trying to do actual journalism. No wonder corporations are running roughshod over us all, the industry is hostile to anyone not willing to be some sort of shill.
And people will bitch and moan about a paywall.
It's a double edged sword. Quality information should be accessible to everyone. We ensure that for kids through public school systems, but for adults you need to pay for it yourself. Which is a huge problems since that is the same demographic as "voters".
Libraries?
We're talking about paywalls for news articles. Libraries dont solve this problem.
Can libraries not get subscriptions to news services for public access?
Libraries are physical media. If you get public access to a newspaper, then one person can read it at a time. You also create a barrier for people to have to drive to a library, which might be closed, hope that nobody else checked out the thing, etc.
It's not at all a solution.
Tell me you haven't actually been to a library in the last 15 years without telling me.
Have you not heard of Libby? Of Overdrive? Next thing you're gonna be telling me Libraries aren't a solution because not everyone can use microfiche...
The problem with paywalled isn't an unwillingness to pay for quality, its being attacked with a subscription when we don't want to be locked into a single source. Today I want a good article on popular particle physics, tomorrow I want to know whats going on with education in Nigeria. Let me make a quick crypto micropayment with no fuss and I'll read your article, try to make me a lifelong subscriber and get fucked.
Thank you. In an age where every single company is trying to wring $5-10/month out of you, sorry, I don't have the budget to subscribe to 10 different news wires. Now if we had a system of 25-50 cents an article, maybe even $1, that would be an entirety different story. I don't give two shits about sports analysis, what's happening on Broadway in NYC, or celebrity gossip. I read my news a la carte. The only exception is my town's weekly local newspaper, which I buy for $1 at the hardware store.
Chrome is looking into adding a website payment system, where you could have a refillable "tip jar", and when you visit websites with paywalls they could pop up with the cost for that specific article. Hit yes, it deducts that from your tip jar, and you read the article.
There are some similarities to a system that Brave browser already uses, except you generally earn money for brave's version by allowing the browser to show you ads (although I'm pretty sure you can buy the credits directly too). Either way, the internet is moving towards needing to pay for content, and trying to find more convenient ways for users to do that.
LOL ‘crypto’
They just snuck that turd in there lol
I'm extremely skeptical of crypto but micro payments and donations seem like one of the most plausible applications for it since the infrastructure can be operated for basically free to receive money and there isn't a large corporation taking a cut of every transaction unlike credit cards
Which crypto network are you talking about that can be operated for free? PoW is expensive and wasteful, and PoS is pretty much back to a regular database again.
At the end of the day here, this is a simple transaction ledger that doesn’t need to be turned into crypto, it just needs a party interested in moving the money around in these micropayments with minimal fees.
😅 Crypto Bad!! Crypto bro dumb! 😅
Exactly! Back in the day, you had two options: (1) subscribe or (2) buy a single magazine or newspaper. Now, there's no equivalent to the newsstand for digital media.
Or (3) go to the library and read it for free.
Does such a system exist, and how do you implement it without a third party login system?
I think you can charge per article on substack. Not entirely sure though.
Some newspaper charge X$ for Y articles, I think the NYTimes do it or used to. It’s usually a horrible deal compared to monthly subscription, but I think that’s the point.
I mentioned this in another comment, but Chrome browser is currently working on it's own implementation of this. It has a high chance of becoming the new standard with Chrome's marketshare, unless there's strong pushback against it (if Google made it a privacy nightmare or something like that).
Brave browser has a version of this already, powered by crypto. Websites need to opt into it before they can earn money from users though, and it's usually just used to replace revenue from brave blocking the websites ads.
Not successfully. Been talked about for decades though. Seems like an apt real world non silk-road use for crypto currency. No login required, just a quick wallet transfer for a few cents and access is gained. Quick and cheap enough that's its not quite worth it to muck around with 12 foot ladders etc.
Companies were doing that with NFTs (which is what you’re describing) but now nobody want to touch an NFT so those companies definitely went bust.
The best case will be companies who can hide the crypto behind the product, like “give us 5$ and we’ll give you 5 read-a-tokens which is totally not crypto btw”. Or wait a couple of years for crypto to come back in vogue.
You're a genius! I would stop removing paywalls if something like this existed.
Yeah, I understand that journalism needs to be paid for, but I don't think paywall's are much of a solution.
I don't want to pay a subscription for one publication's news. I don't even really want a subscription for a selection of publication's news. I just want to read whatever I want to read and I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount for that.
Could you explain more- so you want a la carte options, like pay on a per-article basis? And to be clear, you know that free high-quality print media has never been a thing historically, right? Like, you never could access all articles from the entire history of the NYTimes on demand for free, that was never a thing. The paper for that day was locked in a metal box you had to pay to open, and all you got to see was half the front page.
Or, you know, support libraries...
what gives you the impression that I wouldn't be aware of that. I said in my comment that journalism needs to be paid for.
In a perfect system, you buy some credit with a kind of clearing house, and then pay authors of whatever you wanted to read directly. A few cents a reader would net author's a lot more than they're currently receiving.
Advertising seems to be a dead end. The patron model is starting, but it seems focused on certain personalities. I don't believe anyone has developed a payment system yet that pays for cents at a time.
It's all our collective fault, mine included. I've never paid for news, yet expect unbiased news free from corporate fuckery....
And over here the state-funded media is getting less money every year because our right-wing parties don't like it.
Honest fact based journalism is an essential pillar of a functional democracy. Being informed is absolutely in the public interest, and government funding should support it, precisely because it often isn't profitable or sustainable for private companies (as we keep seeing over the years).
I don't understand why this is so hard to grasp. And the people whining about liberal bias and calling for defunding of public media are missing the forest for the trees (even if some of the journalism is questionable in quality).
There is no such thing as unbiased news free from corporate fuckery. But you can subscribe to several well-known and reputable news outlets, public broadcast services, and other varied reliable sources, and hope that the combined fuckery cancel each other out. For now, that's the best that you can do.
It's not easy and it's not cheap.