We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be.
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
The real answer is that we need a universal web currency, and a tracker that pays web pages on view.
There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost.
No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices.
No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
You're painting 'media' with a broad brush. I have multiple local sources that report on local issues and are critical of the local establishment. A lack of funding is causing local news sources to go out of business.
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft.
I think the biggest issue is the _vast_ majority of news is noise. It won't effect you. Maybe you could argue we should be "aware" of certain events happening but I'd argue most only complicate your life.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
Check if your local library has a PressReader subscription. It doesn't help open links to paywalled articles, but depending on your library, you may already have access to a lot of newspapers and magazines.
If you created software and sold a license for it, and I pirated it, would that be acceptable? They create a product, set the price, you choose to pay or not.
If this News Media Alliance put some effort into enabling per-article micropayments or a prepaid credits system valid across all its members, there'd be fewer people looking to bypass paywalls.
Serious question: How do we expect reporters and journalists to be funded if nobody pays?
I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue.
Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadI want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost.
No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices.
No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.
We need to keep making more of these.
https://github.com/carterworks/yazzy
Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap.
These media companies are parasites.
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
[1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
[2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue.
Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...