I.
I hate paywalls on articles. Absolutely hate them.
A standard pro-business argument: businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don’t like, which you don’t take). They can’t really make your life worse. There are some exceptions, like if they outcompete and destroy another business you liked better, or if they have some kind of externalities, or if they lobby the government to do something bad. But in general, if you’re angry at a business, you need to explain how one of these unusual conditions applies. Otherwise they’re just “helping you less than you wish they did”, not hurting you.
And so the standard justification for paywalls. Journalists are providing you a deal: you may read their articles in exchange for money. You are not entitled to their product without paying them money. They need to earn a living just like everyone else. So you can either accept their deal – pay money for the articles – or refuse their deal – and so be left no worse off than if they didn’t exist.
But I notice feeling like this isn’t true. I think I would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist, compared to the world where they exist but their articles are paywalled. Take a second and check if you feel the same way. If so, what could be going on?
First, paywalled newspapers sometimes use a clickbait model, where they start by making you curious what’s in the article, then charge you to find out.
Here are some articles I’ve seen advertised recently (not all on paywalled sources): “Why Trump’s Fight With Obama Might Backfire”, “This Tech Guru Has Made A Shocking Prediction For 2020”, “Here’s Why Men are Pointing Loaded Guns At Their Dicks”.
I didn’t wake up this morning thinking “I wonder whether men are pointing loaded guns at their dicks, and, if so, why. I hope some enterprising journalist has investigated this question, and I will be happy to compensate her with money for satisfying this weird curiosity of mine.” No, instead, I was perfectly and innocently happy not knowing anything about this, right up until I read the name of that article at which point I became consumed with curiosity, ie a feeling that I will be unhappy until I know the answer. In this particular case it’s fine, because the offending website (VICE) is unpaywalled. I go there and after reading through nine paragraphs attacking “MAGA dolts”, in the tenth paragraph I get the one-sentence answer: there’s a meme in the gun community that any time someone posts a picture with their gun, amateurs will chime in with condescending advice about how they should be holding it more safely, so some people post pictures of them pointing loaded guns at their dicks in order to piss these people off. I feel completely unenlightened by knowing this. It has not brightened my day. It just removed the temporary itch of curiosity.
Some people critique capitalism by saying it creates new preferences that people have to spend money to satisfy. I haven’t noticed this being true in general – I only buy shoes when I need shoes, and I only buy Coke when I want Coke. But it seems absolutely on the mark regarding paywalled journalism. VICE created a new preference for me (the preference to know why some people point loaded guns at their dicks), then satisfied it. Overall I have neither gained nor lost utility. This seems different from providing me with a service.
They have an excuse, which is that this is how they make money. But what’s Marginal Revolution’s excuse? I saw this link in an MR links roundup. It was posted as “5. Why men are pointing loaded guns at their dicks.” So obviously I clicked on it, and here we are. But what is MR’s interest in making me click on a VICE article and read through nine paragraphs about “MAGA dolts”?
I can’t really blame them, because I did the same thing for years. I posted links posts, I framed the links in deliberately provocative ways, and then I felt good about myself when my stats page recorded that thousands of people had clicked on them. Sometimes I would write the whole thing out – “Here’s an article about men pointing loaded guns at their dicks – it’s because they want to criticize what they perceive as an excessive and condescending emphasis on trigger safety in gun culture” – and then nobody would click on it, and I would interpret that as a sign that I had failed in some way. I was an idiot, I apologize to all of you, and I have stopped doing that. I urge other bloggers to do the same – we gain no extra money, nor power, nor readership by being running-dogs for VICE’s weird ploy to trick people into reading its stupid articles. But as long as bloggers, Facebookers, tweeters, etc aren’t following good Internet hygiene, the very existence of paywalled sources will continue to be a net negative for the average Internet user.
This isn’t just about obvious clickbait like men pointing guns at their dicks. “Why Trump’s Fight With Obama Might Backfire” feels exactly the same to me. I don’t want to know more ephemeral garbage about Trump which may or may not affect his polls 0.5% for a week before they return to baseline. I don’t want to get more and more outraged until my ability to relate to my fellow human beings is shaped entirely by whether they’re a “MAGA dolt” or not. And yet I find myself curious what’s in the article!
(Trump’s fight with Obama might backfire because independents like Obama more than Trump, and the tech guru’s 2020 prediction was that Trump will lose. You’re welcome.)
Second, paywalled articles become part of the discourse.
Last week’s Wall Street Journal included an opinion column, Lockdowns Vs. The Vulnerable, arguing that statistics show the coronavirus lockdowns do not really prevent the coronavirus, but do disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people. It’s already gotten retweeted a few dozen times, including by some bluechecks with tens of thousands of followers.
The only conclusion available now is that the Swedes were right: The lockdowns were not sustainable, writes @holmanjenkins https://t.co/WFNEa5ScjV via @WSJ
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) May 30, 2020
Do you want to figure out exactly what statistics it uses and check whether they really show that lockdowns don’t prevent coronavirus? Too bad – the article is paywalled and you cannot read it without paying $19.50/month to the Wall Street Journal. I personally suspect that this article is terribly wrong, possibly to the point of idiocy. But I can neither convince others of this, nor correct my own potentially-false first impression, without paying the Wall Street Journal $19.50 a month. Which I don’t want to do. Partly because it is bad value, and partly because I don’t want to reward them for publishing false things.
Newspapers publish articles – factual and opinionated – intending them to enter the public square as a topic of discussion. But if the discussions in the public square have an entry fee, the public square becomes smaller and less diverse.
It also becomes more of an echo chamber. Probably conservatives subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and liberals subscribe to the New York Times. So if conservatives post articles from the Wall Street Journal, liberals can neither benefit from the true ones and change their own opinions, nor correct the false ones and change conservatives’ opinions. If you can’t even read the other side’s arguments, how can you be convinced by them?
Third, newspapers make it hard to guess whether you will encounter a paywall or not. Some of them raise a paywall on some kinds of articles but not others. Some of them raise a paywall if you’re linked in from social media, but not if you’re linked in from Google (or vice versa). Some of them raise a paywall if it’s your Xth article per month on a certain computer, but not before.
The end result is you can’t just learn to avoid the newspapers with paywalls. If you clearly knew which links were paywalled or not, you would just never click on those links, and not waste any time. Since any given newspaper has like a 25 – 50% chance of being paywalled whenever you read it, you get the variable reinforcement strategy that promotes frustrated addiction. And since at any given moment you are desperate to click on that link and find out Why Some Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns At Their Own Dicks, you will, like a chump, click it anyway, only to howl with rage when the paywall comes up.
This usually isn’t a deliberate misdeed; newspapers understandably want to give people limited access so they can decide whether or not they want to subscribe. But some forms of this do seem deliberate to me. Like when they let you read the first two paragraphs and get emotionally invested in the story, and then surprise you with a paywall in the third (I think this is why you need nine paragraphs of filler before getting to the one-sentence curiosity-satisfier). Or when they wait five seconds before a paywall message pops up, for the same reason.
Fourth, and most important, paywalled newspapers make it hard to search for information on Google. When I was trying to gather statistics on coronavirus to figure out how fast it was spreading, I noticed that the top ten or twenty relevant search results for a lot of coronavirus-related queries were paywalled articles. Because articles will make you wait several paragraphs/seconds before the paywall comes up, I couldn’t just quickly click on something, see if it had a paywall or not, and then move on to the next one. Instead, a search that would have taken me seconds if all paywalled sources ceased to exist ended up taking me several frustrating minutes.
II.
There are some simple steps we can take to fix this.
First, search engines should give users an option to hide paywalled articles from results. I realize how big a shitstorm this will cause, and I plan to enjoy every second of it. If they can’t make this happen for some reason, they should at least display a big red $$$ sign in front of paywalled articles, so users know which links will give them information before they waste a click on them. If Google refuses to do this, Bing should do it to get a leg up on Google. If both of them refuse, DuckDuckGo. If all three of them refuse, sounds like they’re providing an opening for some lucky entrepreneur.
Second, browser or browser-extension designers should figure out some way to automatically get links to display whether they’re paywalled or not. Maybe something like this already exists, but I can’t find it.
Third, bloggers (and social media users) should stop deliberately frustrating their readers. Stop posting tantalizing links like “Why Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns At Their Dicks” without further explanation! If you find the dick-gun phenomenon interesting, post the link plus a one-sentence summary. If someone wants more than the one-sentence summary, they can click the link, but I’ve done A/B testing on this and it never happens.
Fourth, bloggers (and social media users) should preferentially link non-paywalled sites. I realize this is not always possible, but most major stories are important enough that at least one non-paywalled outlet will be covering them.
Fifth, until the browser extension comes through, bloggers (and social media users) who do need to link a paywalled site should let readers know it’s paywalled. For example, Lockdowns Vs. The Vulnerable [PAYWALLED] or [$$$] Lockdowns Vs. The Vulnerable. This will save readers a click and hopefully make bloggers think about what they’re doing and whether it’s really necessary.
I’m making a commitment to do 3, 4, and 5 from now on. If I ever change this commitment, I’ll let you know. If you notice me slipping up, please point it out (nicely) and I’ll try to correct myself.
Most browser extensions that stop scripts from running on a site unless you authorize them, such as NoScript, actually do stop many sites’ paywalls from activating.
Incognito mode in Chrome also bypasses a lot, although not as many as it used to.
The general limiting factor is whether the site paywalls everything automatically or tries to be selective and only do it sometimes. If it’s the latter, blocking their tracking cookies and/or preventing their script from running will likely stop the paywall from activating.
If it’s a site like the Wall Street Journal where you just have to log in to read everything you’re probably out of luck.
I’ve been using uBlock Origin for this lately.
Snapshots on Archive.org and the like will circumvent a wide range of selective barriers. Also useful to get cached versions if post-publication editing is suspected.
+1 for archive.org/web/. It’s become my go-to when I feel it’s really important to know what was in a NYT etc. article. What’s especially nice about it is that the process of copying the url, finding a usable snapshot, etc. takes me long enough to dissuade me when I just have a passing interest. Otherwise I’d have serious reservations about willing this to be a general rule of behavior (because it isn’t sustainable for either archive.org or the newspaper).
I have used webpagetopdf.com. It just converts the content and you download the article. Works better in some sites than others but is very accessible
Also Firefox’s reader mode (the book icon in the URL bar.)
Which basically does “Yes site I realize you think your CSS and JS effects are very pretty. I disagree.”
Once in reader mode, some sites will require a refresh of the page to show the full article.
Also any site that allows x free articles per month stores the number you have read as a cookie, which can be cleared (all browsers let you search for cookies from a particular site and delete only those rather than all cookies), giving another x articles to read.
I’ve found that you need to activate reader mode very quickly to load certain pages properly, or even stop the page from loading and then switching to reader mode will work.
Some huge portion of online annoyances are entirely the fault of JS and (to a lesser extent) CSS. More specifically, it’s the fault of a delivery system that allows the content provider to dictate the UI of their content. Some providers may use this to make an attractive site. Most will use it to force the user’s attention in directions that benefit the provider at the expense of the user.
I don’t know if there’s a stock label for that pattern. I might go with “User-hostile Design”, or “Design By Marketing”, or just say it’s the UI equivalent of spam. All of those would be true.
A similar example: The windows start menu allows the developer to decide where their program icons go. Most seem to like to put them under a folder with their company name. Good for the developer — free brand awareness! — but it makes it impossible to use the menu to find the appropriate app to Do a Thing. It’s like a store allowing manufacturers to decide how their products will be arranged.
Linux distros do not have this problem, and I think part of the reason is that the people deciding where a program goes in the menus are not (usually) the same people who wrote the program.
Allowing the content provider to specify at least the recommended way to display the content certainly has valid use cases. In a world with aligned interests, it would hardly be unreasonable to say “The content provider probably knows better than you what their data is and how it should be displayed”.
Well, they are working hard on this being true by making sure the users have as little chance to learn to customise displaying the content as possible.
In the world where users are actually allowed to understand and change what is going on on their computer, there is a much higher chance that they can express their preferences well enough that following the content provider’s one-size-fits-all presentation exactly would be worse.
People are different; is content provider really knows best the best way of presentation for each user _right now_, they are doing a privacy violation of scale unimaginably larger than the already unimaginably large privacy violations of the modern quasi-monopolies.
Yeah…what other media allows the user to specify how the content is displayed? Changing the contrast setting on your TV or the EQ on your stereo doesn’t count.
Besides, there are plenty of plugins that allow you to do exactly this.
My experience is that many websites are rather hostile towarrds keyboard users and that many such issues come down to an abuse of JavaScript for things that could be done with vanilla HTML.
That said, is there a keyboard short cut for toggling Reader mode? I can’t use a mouse, using my Screen Reader’s mouse emulation is a last resort for dealing with bad web design, and whil reader view’s has an activation button somewhere in the no man’s land between tabbing past the last tabbable element on a page and tabbing to the first tabbable element, a keyboard short cut would be orders of magnitude more accessible, and from the sounds of it, might be quicker thand alt-v to the view menu and arrowing to page style> no style on pages where CSS or JavaScript renders some text invisible.
The keyboard shortcut is F9.
UX people call it dark patterns.
You can get around the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of others by using Bypass Paywalls. It’s a little too edgy to be on the Firefox addon store, but if you’re comfortable manually installing addons, it’s easy.
Selectively disabling javascript is good general advice, too.
I use to use NoScript, but when Firefox 57 forced all extension developers to overhaul their extensions to stay compatible, NoScript became unusable for keyboard-input-only users such as myself.
I was using about:config’s javascript.enable option to toggle scripts on and off, but it’s been getting progressively harder to divide websites into “works best with JavaScript disabled” “and works best with javascript enabled” in a way that minimizes how often I have to toggle.
Anyone know of any modern Firefox extensions(I’m running ESR 68.8.0) that have a No-Script Classic-like context menu entry for enabling/disabling scripts in the active tab without affecting everyting else?
Something to block sites from saving cookies because I click a rndom google search result would be nice too(ideally, I’d like to block all cookies not involved in maintaining my log-ins).
Re: cookies — Self-Destructing cookies with a whitelist?
in cases like this, where the browser “betrays” the user by unconfigurably unconditionally* executing the JavaScript code of any loaded website, there’s one remaining workaround:
pull up the debugger, Pause execution, then reload the page (it’s what I do the once in a blue moon when I feel like reading a paywalled article)
[*no comma was intended there; I’m annoyed at the non-configurablility of conditionality]
Have you tried NoScript again recently? I remember when Firefox 57 came out, NoScript was insufficiently prepared and had to release a half-assed version that didn't really work. But a couple weeks ago, I tried it again, and it seems to be doing fine. I don't do everything with the keyboard, so I don't know if they fixed that issue, but they fixed some issues, so maybe they fixed yours. If you liked it before, then it's worth a look if you haven't checked lately.
Something that works on some sites is to do ctrl-a c immediately after the page loads and before the CSS or whatever it is kicks in. Then paste to a file. The main thing is whether the server is completely refusing to serve the data, or whether it’s serving the data with a request that your browser not show it. If it’s the latter, you can tell your browser to ignore the request, if you’re tech-savvy enough.
The Chrome extension “BehindTheOverlay” lets you selectively remove overlay content blockers just by clicking a button.
Sometimes the site also blocks scrolling, which can often be bypassed by right-clicking the content (after clearing any overlays) and selecting “Inspect”, where you can copy/paste the content.
Never took you for a Rasta, Scott 😉
That said, I’m not sure how to reply to this. On the one hand I uncritically agree with the point about the way it screws up the public discourse. On the other hand, I don’t think that changes the fundamental calculus of “do work, get paid”, and I have to wonder if it’s any worse than 20 or 30 years ago when you could make the argument that the discourse taking place in subscription-only magazines like The National Review or The Atlantic and most of the country never read them.
> I don’t think that changes the fundamental calculus of “do work, get paid”
As he mentioned in the article, it is not adding any net value to anyone, since they are creating an artificial demand just to satisfy it.
At most, you can argue that the value that they add are the minutes of distraction that they provide.
But, for most people, this has a negative value, as they don’t want to be distracted by click-baits.
I’m not sure if you are just making “do work, get paid” the short as possible, but the complete “do work [that provides some value], get paid” seems to solve the problem of why they are not a “normal” business.
It is in the same way that you should not get paid just because you dug a hole somewhere, and on top of that, you absolutely should not get paid if you dug that hole on someone else’s way and made their life worse.
> I have to wonder if it’s any worse than 20 or 30 years ago when you could make the argument that the discourse taking place in subscription-only magazines like The National Review or The Atlantic and most of the country never read them.
I see those old magazines as worse than you can do now, but they were still operating at the technological possible frontier from that time, the same way as something was worse than them before and so on.
And, they would have made their content to more people if they had any means to do that, because they don’t have only economic goals, but some ideological goals also, as they have done with the internet.
Compare those magazines with music or movies, which also have better ways to distribute content now, but keep adding some artificial barriers to still be able to extract some rent from them.
The recent click-bait sites are just a farcical news agency trying to emulate what a news agency has to do to get money.
Providing the low-quality content is a by-product of it, because they are not trying to make some content and get paid for it, but they are trying to get some money and they need to generate something just to attract the views.
National Review now has paywalled most of their online articles. (You can read a certain amount of free articles per month.)
“creating a new demand and then fulfilling it” makes no sense as an argument because it proves too much. The history of technological and commercial innovation from somewhere around the invention of agriculture onwards is the history of “creating new demands and fulfilling them”.
They aren’t really creating demand though, Scott has a demand for information and what they are doing is saying ‘hey look, 10 paragraphs of information, right here! We have done a lot of research on this fascinating new trend and summarized it for you. Totally worth the time!
In the gun/dick case its misleading, all the information in the article could be summed up by a description barely longer than advertisement that got you to click through.
In the paywall scenario they are teasing you with information, and the saying pay to find out more! The main issue being that you don’t get your money back when the article doesn’t deliver. At least when I get a flier in the mail for thousands of dollars off the MSRP on a new car I can go to the dealer and find out more without committing to buying a car first.
I think the important point is that clickbait articles provide no net utility to the consumer, and generally even lead to a net loss: if you don’t click on the article you’re consumed by curiosity, and if you do click on the article you waste your time/money on something unsatisfying. It’s like poisoning a well and then charging people for the antidote; it’s extortionary. To take a more prosaic example, it’s like a bad movie–especially a bad sequel. It draws people in with advertising and the promise of resolving whatever questions the first movie left unanswered, but if you watch it you feel you’ve wasted your time and money, and if you don’t watch it you feel you’re missing out on an important part of a plotline you care about. The difference is that the movie industry has various mechanisms like reviews and ratings that can alert consumers if a movie is bad. Online articles don’t really have such a mechanism.
One of the difficulties is defining in advance exactly what makes an article “clickbait” as opposed to “legitimate journalism”.
The usual way that we select for good journalism (by not reading obviously bad articles, thus giving news sites incentive to only publish good ones) falls down when the point of clickbait is to ask questions we want to find out the answers to, and will read to do so.
This all also tends to mean that the only way to tell if an article is clickbait is to actually read it. And obviously websites will place the comments for an article on the same page (or linked from the article’s page), so you can’t just read the comments before clicking.
I mean, just going by the clickthrough rates people want to read clickbait articles just as much as they want to read good journalism (if not more). So how do you define what’s “clickbait” and what’s “journalism”?
People wanted to eat before agriculture. They wanted to get around before cars.
That’s true for a subset of the articles, it’s definitely not true for anywhere near all. (Scott may think it’s true for all, or at least they make news sites a net negative overall; I disagree.)
Note that at least the Atlantic is (was) not subscription-only at all, since newsstands exist(ed). I don’t know if any newsstands carried NR, but I would assume so. I think this point is even more relevant for newspapers. Somehow the model of “get one big hunk of content for much more than the subscription rate, then subscribe if you don’t want to keep doing that” feels much less soul-destroying than “get a few small bites of ‘free’ content, then subscribe if you want to be able to actually see almost anything.”
In all fairness, in the days of print newspapers and magazines, one person could have a subscription and if there was an article worth sharing, they could hand the hardcopy around at the water cooler at minimal effort.
Sure, one could print out an article to hand around to their meat space friends or save it locally and e-mail the file, but compared to simply sharing a link, that’s a lot of effort especially for people with thousands of strangers they’ve listed as friends on one of the mega social sites.
And at least with print periodicals, there was an argument to be made that most of the cost was for the ink and paper. From the sounds of it, many newspapers that made the print-to-digital transition are charging the same price for access they use to charge for print subscriptions when many other businesses that made the transition have passed some of the savings from not needing to produce physical copies to their customers(e.g. less than $5 for an eBook compared to a $15 paperback or $40 hardcover, 99 centes per song or $8 per album for mp3 download versus $15 for a CD less than $10 a month to stream all the movies you want compared to $20 for a Blu-Ray of a single movie, etc.).
Granted, the only digital media I pay for is $4.27 after tax a month for Amazon Music Unlimited as I generally prefer to own hardcopies and there’s enough free media on the Internet I could never run out of new stuff to consume, but $20 a month for just the Wallstreet Journal sounds absolutely abyssmal as far as value for dollar on digital access goes.
This is because the advertising market has absolutely cratered – Google and Facebook are getting that money now – so newspapers have no choice but to make up for it with subscriptions, otherwise they will simply go out of business. None of the other media you mention have to compensate for a primary revenue stream that has vanished.
There are few media where the physical medium is a significant part of the cost. It’s sometimes the case for emerging media, but not for mature ones. For instance, the first videotapes had double digit costs, but now it costs less than a dollar to make a VHS tape. If a newspaper’s most significant cost is the physical paper, they can easily make that in advertising (which is why companies can afford to mail you completely unsolicited materials of varying degrees of newspaper-ness).
It used to be that ads paid for the paper, and subscriptions plus newsstand sales paid for the reporting.
Newsstand sales online are hard. What exactly are you going to deliver, and how do you let your customer keep access just to the issues/articles they’ve paid for while limiting passing it around? Subscriptions are theoretically easier, but hard to get people to buy.
For me, personally, the biggest problem with paywalls is not the idea that someone wants me to pay to read something but that the process of payment itself is a hassle. You have to sign up, use your credit card, possibly subscribe to something which you then have to cancel if you really only wanted to read that one article, and so on.
My hope is that cryptocurrency tools like “Moneybutton” will make this better at some point soon. “Want to know why some men are pointing guns at their dicks?? Click this button to pay 25 cents and find out!” is so much better to me than the same thing except you have to sign up, give away your e-mail address, etc. etc. Sure, I might wish I could have my 25 cents back after I unlock the answer, but it’s mostly the time and effort and spam-free inbox I want back when I make the mistake of going around a paywall, not the actual money.
Of course having my email address and credit card info and subscription that I’ll probably forget to cancel on file is itself worth something to companies, but if they can get 10 times as many clicks by taking away the small inconvenience it might be worth it (and I would also be willing to pay a premium to let that click be the beginning and end of my relationship with the site).
Mm, I see this sentiment a lot — just use microtansactions to charge me for exactly the content I consume! E.g. https://medium.com/@kasperkubica/a-plea-for-micro-transactions-1e24f2d0fd48. But on the publishing side I don’t think it makes business sense.
The biggest problem is consumer psychology; there’s a huge mental block to paying for anything in the first place. You might think that a $0.25 per-article fee and a $2.50 all-you-can-read bundle for one month (where the average reader reads 10 articles) will produce roughly the same thing revenue, assuming no payment friction. But readers don’t perceive monetary costs in a linear fashion. The difficulty was in going from $0 to $0.01, convincing your reader that your articles are worth paying for at all.
Once you’ve overcome the mental hurdle of “free”, it’s not 10 times as hard to convince someone to pay $2.50 as $0.25, it’s maybe something like only 2x or 3x as hard. So the economically rational thing in terms of maximizing revenue is to charge more for the bundle.
This doesn’t even factor in the compelling business case for having a predictable monthly revenue stream from users who tend to forget to cancel. You’ll notice how even the biggest names in consumer software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop changed from one-time up-front costs to a monthly subscription.
Also: hey! Hope things have been going well 😉
My Steam library disagrees – I frequently buy games on a whim just because the process has no friction at all, is a one-time purchase with no strings attached, and the game can be refunded if it’s total garbage. If not for Steam I’d still be pirating 90% of the games I play.
Although I’ve read that there are cases of gaming the system, pre-selling a game, not delivering, and refusing to give refunds.
I’m averse to spending anything because it’s a pain more than because it costs $1
Yeah. I even have subscriptions to several major news sites but I still end up using paywall-bypass tricks because, you know, sometimes my browser forgets to log me in, or I’m on a different computer where I haven’t logged in yet, or whatever. And half the time I can’t even remember what I have subscribed to, and it’s a pain to look through LastPass and figure it out.
So in this case where the price in dollars is literally zero but the price in hassle is still there, and frequently stops me.
But only in the first place, not in the second or the third. Once someone pays 0.25 for an article, that becomes the norm, and if the article was worth anything they’ll be willing to do it again.
Also wouldn’t that argument apply to grocery stores? “Don’t charge $6 for every ten pounds of potatoes, charge a high monthly membership fee for unlimited potatoes.”
I don’t think it would, since newspapers have mostly fixed expenses and near zero marginal production cost, unlike grocery stores. Also, the same grocery store sells many similar items with different brands, different unit costs, and so on. I think the clearer comparison might be to something like Freshly where you pay a fixed per-meal cost for a varying menu you choose from, or Poland Spring’s home delivery service.
That said, I do, in fact, pay a membership fee to Costco for the privilege of paying lower per-unit costs on a pre-selected subset of items throughout the year, which seems like a similar model adapted to a higher-marginal-production-cost environment.
It’s plausible to me that the psychological gap between $0 and .01 exists because of the friction involved in paying rather than because of the price difference itself. To add my own anecdote to the pile, I will often avoid an otherwise good deal because I don’t want to have to go through the whole payment process, and I would buy “worse” deals far more often if the process were friction-less. My experience buying computer games is very similar to @a real dog’s.
I’m also going to signal boost the idea that it is the hassle of paying more than the cost. I rent movies from Amazon fairly frequently. All I have to do is hit play on it, and it charges me the rental fee and I’m watching. There is zero hassle, to the point that I’ve rented movies on Amazon that I already owned hard copies of, but the thought of digging through the DVD box to find it was a higher cost to me than the $3 Amazon was charging. I think that a service that let you buy articles a la carte would do quite well.
This.
Even when the payment is very much NOT micro, like with paper newspapers, there are many advantages to a one-off payment. Especially if you can do it in cash.
For example, I might be very embarrassed about my addiction to gossip/porn/hunting/beauty magazine or whatever. I might not want it to be visible to anybody who can check my bank transaction history (my spouse, the CIA, the judgy clerk in the bank).
If I go to a grocery store, and I see that Cosmo has an article like, I don’t know, “Ten signs your boyfriend is cheating on you”, I can buy it by putting it in the same cart as my bananas, pay for it in cash, so it doesn’t appear anywhere anybody can check, read the artcile, and throw the Cosmo into the trash. No subscriptions, no emails, nobody will even know that I bought that Cosmo except the clerk, and they’ll forget it because they don’t care.
Paper also offers other things, like vanity purchases. Buy this edition of Young Naturalist, because it contains your kids’ article on the cool shapes of oak leaves! You can then even frame it and put it on the wall, or something.
Yes. In the days of paper, I could buy a single issue, and sometimes did. I almost always regretted any subscription I signed up for without first forming a habit of buying newsstand copies. So I stopped doing that.
This is basically impossible with the on-line model, even when there are a few free articles. I can’t sample the table of contents for free, and find out how much value a subscription is likely to give me. I can’t know that the subscription comes with annoying surveys about how much I like the product, or multiple daily teaser emails to encourage me to read articles. I can’t know that while the FAQ claims that as a subscriber I can share articles which won’t be paywalled for the recipients, they’ll actually be unreadable unless those recipients turn off their ad block, and so loaded with ads as to not be worth the bother. etc. etc.
FWIW, I’m currently subscribed to a local newspaper entirely to stop my housemate from making special trips to a store to buy the print edition, creating additional risk of us catching CV-19. I think I preferred picking it up at the grocery store every Sunday to having all the extras that come with our subscription ;-( At best, it’s a wash – I have online access 7 day a week, as well as the paper copy on Sunday, but I’m not sure that’s a plus. (But they don’t sell Sunday paper only…)
AKA “Subscribe to all our articles and a lifetime of spam!”
Brave Browser has some good solutions to this, I think. It has a built-in cryptocurrency function, some of which is supposed to automatically go to the websites you visit, and others there you can “tip” for access.
I haven’t sat down to figure it out because I know by the time I get done figuring it out it will have changed completely.
My ideal payment processor would be one where you pay a fixed price monthly, then divides out your payments to any media sites that you visit that month. So I could say that I’m willing to spend $X/month on media, and then it does all the math to see where the money should actually go. (e.g. if I subscribe for $10/month, and spend 80% of my time on SSC, Scott would get a check for $8 at the end of the month)
You could add all sorts of options on here, maybe allow allocation of funds only based on sites that you ‘liked’. You could have subscription tiers, where paywalls could limit access to only people who have a pool of at least $Y they spend each month.
Regardless, if it were a nice simple interface, where all I need to do is click a thumbs-up to grant someone a part of my media budget for the month, I think it would go a long way towards breaking down the barrier between monetized/non-monetized content.
Seriously, look into Brave Browser. In addition to the auto-generated cryptocurrency you can top off with extra money a month.
And then tell me how it works, because my attitude that everything is trying to scam me 100% of the time makes it hard to sit down and look.
That looks interesting, I’ll check it out when I’m on a PC I can install something other than IT defaults on.
At a first look, it seems like it’s combining an ad-blocker with an ad service and passing along some of the payment to you, for you to give to the content creator. I’m not sure that is any better than just letting the content creator just put up their own ads, other than you have control over which ads you see, and who to support. Also, it claims to not store personal data, so the privacy side of things is likely better, and seems to be what the browser is addressing in the first place.
I like the concept and will check it out, but I’d still prefer to have something that automatically distributes the monthly cash based on pageviews/time/something so that there isn’t an action I actually have to take to pay the content creator. Maybe that will be my new side project if I ever get some downtime at work.
AFAIK, you can turn off Brave’s ads and just buy cryptocurrency instead. And you can select people (more precisely, websites) to give monthly tips to. By default it allocates tips based on time spent on the website, though if you run out of cryptocurrency, it’ll stop paying tips, so you have to buy it every once in a while. The only disadvantage currently is that if a website hasn’t signed up to Brave’s system, it can’t get your tips. But AFAIK Brave remembers the tip amounts in case the website signs up in the future.
OK, got this installed, and it actually looks really cool. However, for a browser focused on privacy, setting up the uphold account to fund all of it asks for way more data than I normally give out on the internet. Depending on how much you care about that kind of thing, it may be a dealbreaker, though I think you can still use most of the functionality without verifying the wallet.
Check out Coil. It does the same thing that Brave is doing, but no need for cryptocurrency. Can just use a $5/month subscription with credit card.
> You have to sign up
I’ve pretty much stopped creating accounts at any place I can’t log in with one of the existing secure mechanisms I can use to log in (eg. Google, Facebook, whatever). *Especially* if they are going to want money from me.
I take the exact opposite tack: I will not link accounts on different services to each other because I fundamentally do not trust Google, Facebook, et al.
LastPass (or similar) makes managing the large number of distinct random passwords tractable.
Am I the only one who sees a little dissonance between not trusting Google/Facebook and using a single company to manage all your passwords?
Maybe, if people aren’t aware of the distinctions, or why people might want to have different providers in charge of different things, or that fact that LastPass doesn’t make money selling my passwords to advertisers.
So far as I know, neither are Google or Facebook. I’m no defender of the big tech companies, nor do I like constant data collection.
I just found the surface level “I don’t like these big companies having all my information, so I give this other company all my passwords” juxtaposition amusing. I realize there is more to it than that.
Google and Facebook sell off the data they have to advertisers.
LastPass doesn’t sell any of the data I have. LastPass doesn’t have access to my passwords.
Why I hate toll roads:
0% having slightly less money after using it
2% ideology (government should provide basic infrastructure)
98% the hassle of paying
New toll roads are license-plate based, if you don’t use a transponder.
In my experience (which I admit isn’t recent), I either have the hassle of stopping and paying cash every time, or I have the larger but one-time hassle of setting up a the system where I get charged automatically when I drive through. It seems like a license-plate system would still be the one-time hassle.
EZ pass works on virtually every toll road on the east coast, and you sign up once to get a transponder and never have to think about it again. (I realized that they still had my old car in their system for 3 years before I remembered to update it but it was never an issue). I acually don’t mind paying the tolls as I have the opposite view to you – the people driving on the roads should be the ones paying for them, and the ones who drive more often should pay more. $18 for the GWB seems a little steep though.
This is exactly how I feel. Buying an item is task, but subscribing to a service is a chore, one that involves the initial setup then deciding again and again if I think the subscription is valuable to me. If I decide it isn’t I have to take steps to end it. More than likely I will forget about it, only to discover months later that I have been paying for a service I don’t use. One of the odd benefits of the physical newspaper or magazine is that it is a tangible reminder of the service that you are spending money for, where an unnoticed eprint subscription just siphons off money quietly in the background.
I use this extension to fix paywalls. It’s well-maintained and basically works on 100% of websites people link me to in the wild. It’s kind of surprising to me that so few people seem to use this, in contrast to the wide adoption of adblockers.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
+1. This extension has vastly reduced my day-to-day frustration. Can’t recommend it enough. It works for Firefox as well.
I sometimes cave in and use something like that, but I’m not sure I endorse it.
What exactly were you envisioning an extension would do if not that?
Add ⚠$🝙 to the visible text of each link to paywalled content
Did u see the extension I found that claims to do as you ask?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paywall/kemhkjedapfedmoaliehjgdllceafeng
I very much enjoy your links pages, and hope this has not discouraged you from making more of them.
Seconded. I also think I enjoy the curiosity-inciting link descriptions. Although in this narrow case that might have a lot to do with an assumption that a curious sounding link in a links post on this blog is likely to follow through with something actually interesting.
Thirded.
Fourthed.
Fifthed
Six thed
Honestly, your main complaint sounds backwards to me. You say you’re annoyed about clickbait, but your main example of clickbait is a Vice article without a paywall. And that’s exactly as expected. If you don’t use any paywalls, then you are paid by advertising, so your income is directly tied to how many clicks you can drum up. The whole idea is that subscribing readers give you steady income, so you don’t need to put out clickbait, and if you do they’ll get annoyed and leave. The general trend is that the higher the barrier to readers, the less clickbaity a source is.
Similarly, while I like the notion that everything that plays any role in the public discourse should be completely free and universally accessible, that is an ideal that has literally never been satisfied by any communication medium in history — except for an anomalous period from about 2005 to 2015 where newspapers inexplicably gave out their work on the internet for free. That is absolutely not a normal equilibrium and we should not have expected it to last forever. But the hedonic treadmill is strong. We’ve gotten used to having our pick of hundreds of articles per day for free, even though this makes no economic sense. The paywalls are just reality coming back in.
I’m not sure I’d say it’s completely backwards, I agree with most of the points made, but then we are stuck with the problem of finding a better alternative.
Advertising and sponsorship are currently the main alternatives, both of which also have their downsides, and I’d agree with knzouh that they’re a bigger driver of click bait.
The Guardian doesn’t paywall anything, but asks for donations to support quality journalism. Seems like a better model perhaps, providing enough people are willing to donate?
I also don’t mind so much the x number of articles per month model either, seems pretty fair. I don’t think you can expect high quality journalism for free forever, just doesn’t seem sustainable.
There’s a demand for well researched objective journalism, albeit a relatively tiny fraction of the market, it makes sense that the people that want this pay for it somehow.
I had forgotten about the Guardian, but noticed that Vox is doing the same thing now.
I wonder whether the actual entrepreneur opportunity is slightly different than scott has suggested:
1/ I wouldn’t pay $19.50 to WSJ every month, but you could probably twist my arm to pay it *to read whatever I wanted on any news site*.
2/ If there was a browser extension / platform which enabled me to (A) pay for individual articles out of my monthly subscription or (B) just read whatever I wanted and reimburse sites accordingly, I think I’d sign up. (A) might evenly better because it would require less surveillance and might prompt me to think more critically about whether I valued a “clickbait” article enough to actually read it. Being able to access anything for one fee would mitigate some of the damage caused by people buying subscriptions to their own ideologically-friendly newspaper.
Newspapers have to get paid and advertised-funded content is visibly less valuable than subscription content, so I can’t agree with the main thrust of what scott is saying in the article.
To me a lot of this can be explained by newspaper CEOs falling under the thrall of the Doctorow-Shirky class of media consultants who very confidently told them that anyone charging money for content was living in the past. See for instance Doctorow’s notorious “New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy?” from 2011: “I’m all for finding a business-model for investigative journalism, but for such a business model to work, it has to be viable.” (The New York Times now makes more than $400 million a year from digital subscriptions.) If brilliant futurists like him hadn’t been so influential back then, the newspaper industry would probably now be in a much healthier state overall. As you say, they had at least ten lost years.
Yes, quality journalism has to be paid for somehow. And paywalls seem to work for that. If the price of entry to the forum where the public intellectuals hold court is a handful of subscriptions to major news sources, that seems quite reasonable.
I will agree that links to pay-walled sources are annoying. Identifying them as pay-walled is good practice. Including enough of an excerpt from the linked material that following the link is distinctly optional is even better.
I think the costs add up quite a lot. Certainly if you have to get subscriptions to, say 10? For non-US people, you need both the US ones and several of your national ones.
It’s annoyingly common for a single article to become the centre of controversy, even from relatively obscure papers.
I can’t actually be bothered to look up each individual subscription fee (especially with all the different bundles), but even at an average 2.99 a month per paper, that’s what, £30? per month. Excluding the apparently gold plated WSJ. Negligible to some, but the sort of expense you might cut if you were suddenly hard up.
Personally I wouldn’t want anyone tipped out of the public intellectual discourse for financial reasons. I think the cost to the discourse is potentially pretty high. Most of the time it’s not important, but sometimes you’ll be losing the gifted academic writer who could have changed minds, but had to cut the subscriptions to cover the rent.
I think we have very different definitions of quality journalism. Scott started this article by mentioning what he believes to be a high-profile failure the Wall Street Journal, which is (as I understand it) one of the stronger sources of journalism remaining. Which draws attention to just how far the industry has declined.
I would happily pay quite a bit for access to reliable, accurate journalism (setting a low bar for reliability here, less “impartial paragon of perfection” and more “doesn’t repeat things already debunked by friendly fact-checkers”). But it isn’t for sale in the modern market at any price. And paying $20 per month for political clickbait won’t make it appear.
The problem is there are fundamentally too many news organizations doing the same damn thing. I mean there are 49 seats in the WH press room!?!? WTF that doesn’t produce any more original coverage it just wastes money (and the more reporters there the greater the president’s ability to choose what questions he’ll get not less).
I firmly believe that the amount of money that the combination of TV advertising and print advertising on news provides would be more than capable of supporting far more original investigative reporting if there were only 3 or so national reporting platforms in media and print (they could have location relativized pages for big media market but no Chicago tribune paying someone to rewrite same story and ads and sales and copy editors). But a lot more big news orgs are going to wed to bite the dust first.
As far as the Doctorow model of no paywall it’s probably totally correct except for the part where all the papers stay afloat. Just like shopping online the equilibrium is a handful of big winners and everyone else out of business and until that happens you’ve got to be willing to spend money you don’t have like water.
Absolutely. There is no reason for a damn nudi-mag to have a WH corespondent.
Which are the 49 publications that are allowed to be ask the President questions? Yes it might cost a bit of money for a nudie magazine to send a reporter there, but it would cost a lot more in terms of democracy to limit presidential access to a handful of publications.
There is already a limit to presidential access to a handful of publications. It is called “whoever the White House Correspondents’ Association decides is worthy of a seat.” They are the ones that grant or deny press credentials and assign seating. There are 3x as many White House corespondents as there are seats, from 2x as many news organizations with corespondents as there are seats.
The problem is there just isn’t that much f*ing news. How much does it cost to lodge ~150 corespondents and their entourages in DC, fly them around on Air Force One, drive them around in the President’s motorcade, give them Secret Service Protection, and pay the bribes to the WHCA to get seats in the briefing room, on AF1, and in the motorcade? Oh yeah, and bankroll the White House Corespondents Dinner which is just jam packed with A list celebrities (who are all getting paid $50k a pop to be there). Just so your corespondent can write the same damn story that ~150 other corespondents are going to write.
I mean, how absurd is it that it takes 150 corespondents, plus their entourages, to report on what one lazy fat guy does in a day?
It is almost as if being a White House corespondent has all these awesome material perquisites plus a shit ton of prestige that reporters really really really want whether or not it actually advances the financial interests of their publication or the interests of the public. I don’t know, something about how their incentives are not aligned, maybe.
The whole thing isn’t sustainable. Especially when random 3rd rate political Youtubers (who the WHCA would never in a million years give a seat to because they’re not “real journalists”) get more daily views than most of these news organizations.
It is just emblematic of the rot in the system when a corespondent from a fucking nudie-mag gets a seat in the briefing room when ~100 corespondents from ~50 news organization (that, I don’t know, probably have more people in their circulations that actually read the articles rather than “I just get it for the articles”) don’t have one.
I’d agree with it being backwards. Journalism has long relied on headlines to draw interest, and yeah, they can be obnoxious, but journalism has to be paid for and we’ve seen a collapse of the industry in recent decades. This is most devastating, where actual existing journalism is a useful source of accountability and municipal government performance goes down when it goes away. All the complaints about journalist practice certainly apply to local journalism, it’s still a public good.
I think bloggers should first preferentially link the best version of coverage we’ve read, including if it’s paywalled. That said, we aren’t in the business of writing headlines for others, so shortly giving the gist without concern to the clicks it generates makes sense to me.
I do think there are better, alternate, models. I do subscribe to a variety of free sites in part in hopes of keeping them free. I think there’s a stronger argument against paywalls for things like government grant-funded research and the like, and I do think that local journalism probably just needs to be subsidized and that those subsidies should come with guaranteed community access provisions.
This isn’t to say that there’s no merit to the practice, but linking to quality free stuff (let alone parasitical free stuff that just repurposes other reporting), is not enough to economically sustain an ecosystem that historical levels of journalism and we as a society are suffering from it. I think blogs are great, better than the social media ecosystem that followed, but even great blogs aren’t enough.
Intensely curious what your data on this looks like (though I acknowledge the incentives not to share). My ability to check user behavior on other people’s sites is obviously constrained, but my estimates top out at ~10% for a topline link with a highly-engaged audience; I doubt whether a supporting link halfway through an article would break 1%.
I don’t keep formal data. Informally, a links post usually gets 15000 recorded hits, and probably an equal number unrecorded (because they’re going through the main page and never clicking the post itself). A popular link usually gets about 1000 clicks, an unpopular one a few hundred. Ones whose description hides exactly what’s going on and teases the reader to click and find out more are usually the most popular.
How can you even tell what people are clicking on? Just at a browser-technology level, I mean.
You can have a middle link that redirects to the other one, something like ssc.com/link1, ssc.com/link2 etc. The middle links count how many clicks they got. WordPress could potentially do this automatically for any posted links (idk if they do)
Saying you A/B tested something does raise expectations. Please consider changing it to “I’ve looked at some traffic data and it *never* happens”.
Much appreciated, and sounds about in line with my metrics.
Hmm… I wonder if it’s worth making a distinction between a link that exists as a supporting source, and a link that is intended to lead the readers to an interesting thing. Not sure there’d be a vastly different click-through rate, though they do seem to be conceptually different.
Pages that show the full article briefly and then block it with a paywall (including the New York Times) can be defeated with this procedure:
-Using Chrome, open the page in an incognito window
-Open dev tools (Command+Ctrl+I on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows)
-Open the command menu (Command+Shift+P on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows)
-Type “Disable Javascript” to find the “Disable Javascript” option (it auto-completes, so you probably only need to type “Dis” and it’ll be the top result) and hit enter
-Refresh the page
You can also
1. Click on the button immediately to the left of the address bar (it’ll either be a lock or say “Not Secure”).
2. Select “Site Settings” in the dropdown.
3. Switch JavaScript from “Allowed (Default)” to “Block”.
4. Refresh the page.
Then in the future it’ll remember that you’ve disabled Javascript for the site.
The most common downside of doing this is that low-resolution placeholder images won’t be replaced with proper high-resolution images, but for articles where that matters, you can switch Javascript back on.
Will you look at that! I can read Megan McArdle again!
Or the rushed C^a C^c then paste the text into a document.
say no more, fam
Another awful thing about newspaper subscriptions is the deliberate inconvenience of canceling. Here’s the WSJ’s FAQ answer about canceling:
(Here’s Paul Graham arguing with a WSJ editor about it on Twitter.)
And that is why I am not willing to pay for subscriptions. Seriously, I am supposed to make an international call and go through a help desk that will try to upsell me?
I think a real answer to “how do deal with paywalls?” is “pay” but damned if the industry hasn’t made me as scared as possible to do it.
I keep on thinking I should support a) a national paper like Washington Post (mostly for their columnists) and b) my local paper. Because the pithy quote that “journalism matters” really is true.
But so much of my life hassles are things that others have deliberately decided should be my hassles and I’m sick of it.
I see someone in that Twitter thread suggesting a market for a pay-service that will be the middleman for you and do all this. Does it exist? [1]
[1] In a previous thread someone pointed out a service that will be the middleman between you and charities, which was sorely needed. I made a one-time donation to a certain liberal-leaning org and I’ve gotten piles and piles of shit in my mailbox forever as a thank you. I hate them. I really hate them.
I pay for New York Times with PayPal so if I wanted to unsubscribe I would just cancel the recurring payment in my PayPal account, it would take 45 seconds.
Does the NYT scream at you for that (sending you overdue notices or late fees or whatever) or do they just painlessly turn off your subscription?
Well, yeah, and if you pay by credit card, you can do a chargeback, but that doesn’t address the issue of them having a legal claim that you owe them money. “Hey, I’ve found a life-hack for getting free cars. Lease a car, then just stop making payments.”
Oh come on, I’ve used the PayPal method to cancel any number of services I’ve signed up to, absolutely none of them have ever tried to pursue me in any meaningful way. The worst thing that happens is you get a reminder email. A digital subscription is not like a car.
Have you tried it with a gym?
This is both the reason why I haven’t “cut the cord” on cable, and why I would if I ever did.
Basically I worked out that, to maintain my current consumption, I wouldn’t actually save that much money. But it is a huge pain in the ass to cancel cable or even modify my plan. Some of this is necessary – e.g the receiver box is owned by the cable company and they want you to return it – but a lot of it isn’t. For example you can easily add channels or upgrade your plan on the website. But to remove anything, they make you call them (which they also make as painful as possible). Obviously, the web interface has the ability to downgrade your plan with minimal fuss, they just choose not to allow this.
This to me is one of the bigger attractions of e.g. Hulu. Almost everything that is not a Hulu exclusive I can get with the no-extra-cost On Demand from the cable (The Hulu app is nicer, but the content is the same). BUT Hulu is easy to subscribe, cancel, upgrade, downgrade.
This aggravates me at least as much as clickbait. Subscriptions designed to get you stuck in them by inertia. I would love to have a dashboard somewhere that listed all of my subscriptions and I could just turn them on and off with zero friction. If a bunch of news services did that together, that would be nice.
Probably the most striking thing in the linked Twitter thread between Paul Graham and the WSJ Editor Guy is how the Editor Guy is completely engaged until Paul asks “Can I cancel by clicking a button?”
And the Editor Guy completely disappears. The position is so completely indefensible that Editor Guy doesn’t even bother. He can’t even acknowledge the question. Because there is no good answer.
Yeah, I’m libertarian as hell but there really oughta be a law that you must be allowed to cancel a recurring charge via the same medium you agreed to incur the charge in the first place.
If I can sign up on a website, I damn well better be able to cancel on a website.
It seems plenty defensible to me.
“We make it super-easy to sign up for a subscription and somewhat inconvenient to cancel because that’s the arrangement that we believe makes us the most money. We are a for-profit organization, and we would rather make more money than less. This is morally legitimate. We have a responsibility to make it realistically possible for a subscriber to cancel his or her subscription, and we meet that standard. We do not have a responsibility to make it as easy as possible, and we don’t. If this arrangement is unacceptable to you, nobody is forcing you to do business with us.”
You’re completely right, that is the defence of their position: “we’re a business, we’re in this to make money for our owners, now that hard copies of printed newspapers are not the way people prefer to access media then selling on-line subscriptions is our model. And for that model to work best and generate revenue, making it easy to subscribe and badgering you to subscribe and teasing you with content you cannot access unless you subscribe, but then making it maximally inconvenient to unsubscribe, is the way to go”.
Except Editor Guy can’t say that, because he is supposed to be taking the position of the editorial rather than business side of the house (which are supposed to be separated from one another by an Iron Curtain and never the slightest hint that business can dictate to editorial what to put in the paper or what not), because then that undercuts the entire earnest spiel of “we are journalists, this is a sacred profession of telling the truth, afflicting the comfortable, and providing a public service, won’t you even spare pennies to support our crusade for truth, justice and a hard-boiled egg for all?”
It’s legitimate to make money by providing value. Intentionally adding a hassle, do deter the
targetcustomer from ceasing payments, lies somewhere between begging and extortion.There is a natural tension between the buyer and seller, since their incentives and desires are not perfectly aligned. The buyer wants more service at a lower price; the seller wants to provide less service for a higher price. Exactly what level of service should be delivered at what price is not usually a moral issue, except maybe at the extremes, or if there are other factors at play. It is simply something to be decided by negotiation, if possible, or by opting in and opting out, if not.
Within this model, making cancellation easy or troublesome can be viewed as either a pricing decision (making the total cost of service somewhat higher or lower) or a service decision (making the service delivered better or worse). Either way, the service provider can legitimately choose to charge more or offer less, if they are willing to bear the cost of lost business for doing so.
The term “indefensible” clearly means “does not admit of a response that would not be a public relations nightmare”, so your comment is not a rebuttal. And even within the for-profit paradigm, responding to someone complaining about your business model by telling them that the proper recourse to not liking a business model is to not do business with the company, is hardly a smart move.
Cancellation isn’t the value. Adding to its cost isn’t charging extra for the product, it’s adding to the price of leaving. In other words, it’s requesting a fee to stop buying.
It’s not part of the price of the product, since a customer doesn’t have to pay this price if they stay subscribed. It’s strictly a penalty imposed on those who decide to renounce.
Essentially, it’s an attempt to subvert the free market, by imposing costs on the decision to stop buying.
Also, many times, it’s not evident that canceling will cost extra, which is an added layer of dishonesty.
Let’s go with the notion that ease or difficulty of cancellation is part of service quality. I think that makes things clearer. When selling online subscriptions, making it easy to cancel is providing a higher quality service than if it is complicated. This part we agree on, right?
Is the seller morally obligated to provide the best possible service, or provide it for the lowest possible price? No, not really. If they can provide less or charge more, it’s ok to do so, particularly if doing so is to their benefit. The seller is obliged to provide what was agreed to, but if the customer agrees to worse terms, that’s their business, not the selller’s.
In a free market, the seller may not be able to do that, because customers have many options, shop around carefully, and have a lot of information available about the products they are buying. But this is only sometimes the case. Sometimes there are only a few options available, and sometimes customers are not terribly vigilant. In such cases it is ok to charge more or deliver less, if you can do so, and it is profitable to do so. And stepping from the general case of delivering less to the specific of making it less convenient to cancel and online service, doing so is acceptable practice.
I would agree there are some special cases where this argument does not apply, like outright survival scenarios, particularly vulnerable people, or total monopolies and such, but I’m speaking here of essentially ordinary services delivered at ordinary prices to normal people. The seller should also be honest about the terms offered, particularly if they are not what the customer would normally expect. But that also doesn’t seem to be the point of conflict.
This is the thing. Making cancellation difficult on purpose, means that departing customers get worse service than if they’d stayed. It’s as if, when leaving a bar, you either sign a legal pledge to return tomorrow, or you get punched in the face.
Customers expect to be able to cancel without hassles… to prevent them from cancelling is to make the original contract under false pretences, i.e. theft.
I would love to have a dashboard somewhere that listed all of my subscriptions and I could just turn them on and off with zero friction.
So I am investigating getting a Washington Post subscription. And I found the page where they say unsubscribing is easy:
https://helpcenter.washingtonpost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000177571-How-to-cancel-your-digital-only-subscription
But, what I really noticed was that I can manage your subscriptions to newspapers via Google News, Amazon, or iTunes.
Could this work, at least for newspaper subscriptions? Have Google News do all the billing and I get my online access?
I hate giving Google any more data that I already do. But for other people this may be an option. I sure hope it doesn’t mean that I could only view it on my dedicated Pixel / Fire / iPad devices, though.
The link to Graham’s tweet led me to this further tweet:
https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1268927124452380672
No one who posts something like that deserves to be paid for engaging in “journalism”.
I would like to invite you (readers) to change your mind about one of the top claim:
‘businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don’t like, which you don’t take). They can’t really make your life worse. There are some exceptions … ‘
My claim is that *nowadays* new businesses that make your life worse are not the exceptions, but the rule.
My reasoning is: capitalism emerged as people getting payed by satisfying other people’s needs. At the beginning, these were basic needs. This is the capitalism that we like, because it gives us food, shelter, the IMPORTANT stuff. Once these are satisfied, capitalists will automatically try to satisfy less and less important needs in order to exploit less obvious markets. This is the capitalism we LOVE, because it gives us all the fancy stuff like non-basic food, books, tv, youtube, videogames.
Once that these have been satisfied and the market is mostly saturated, capitalists will find new ways to make money. They will exploit our human nature to create new needs. The boundary between the second and third type is very thin. Videogames might as well be on this stage. Paywalls are here for sure, but so is facebook, most of twitter, cigarettes, etc. Notice that after some decades of capitalism, this stage *has* to happen, and it will probably be the predominant way new company will try to make money, assuming the economic landscape of the first two stages is not too shaky (that is, the businesses making the first two stages are not changing continuously so that most of the effort is used to sustain and replace them).
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Suck?
I don’t play video games much these days but I count them as stage 2
Who gets to decide what’s stage one, two, or three? I feel like you are looking at other people’s preferences and saying “they don’t really need that! It’s a shame it is offered to them!” when those things might be bringing them far more happiness than your stage two things, which they think are ridiculous.
I’m left entirely unconvinced by the “stages” and this whole idea that first there was capitalism that we LOVE and it brought us youtube and videogames but then it became rotten and invented horrible things like gambling and cigarettes. Really?
There was and is only one kind of capitalism, and it always tried to exploit human nature, but we LOVE it anyway because… what’s the other option again? Who’s going to decide whether the government should send cops to confiscate my videogames?
Your examples:
Facebook – People always needed to connect socially with others and communicate, now they can do it super-easy (and in-person or via letter is tough for many people) and for the nominal cost of a little personal info and being exposed to a little advertising, which they’re very much willing to pay because they want to be able to do this.
Twitter – Same as above
Cigarettes – Been around for hundreds of years, so doesn’t fit as a recent development.
The basic issue with your assertion is that of revealed preference. If you play video games for an hour while claiming you’d really rather be working out instead, you’ll excuse everyone else for believing your actions over your words, even if you think you aren’t being untrue.
Same with paywalls, BTW. I also dislike them, but I demonstrate that by refusing to click on links to certain websites, or else technically bypassing them. If enough people did that, they’d all go away, but there are enough people who value the content more than they mind paying the subscription to make paywalls somewhat viable.
I absolutely didn’t mean to make any claim about any particular need. Facebook and videogames and cigarettes were general placeholders for stuff categorized in the 3 phased I mentioned, but you don’t have to agree about them. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, humans have a hierarchy of preference. The basic level is shared by most people (e.g. most people would prefer a world with abundant food and not videogame compared with a world with videogames and scarce food). The higher levels are not.
I believe that my claim should be unsurprising: it will be an emergent property of any capitalist system that the most important needs will be satisfied first, the less important ones later. After that, they will need to make up new needs. They have obviously tried to do that since forever, but it wasn’t that easy, as human behaviour is full of noise. Today, with all the massive amount of information that they have about each one of us, they could actually hack our brain and give us *exactly* what we want – *whether we want it or not*.
[Connected to this, I would invite you to take a look at the digital minimalism movement. Are you really choosing to use social media when social media are designed to be maximally addictive? There are people whose only job is to make sure that you keep your face stuck as much as possible on the device. They will make you do it under the pretense of some ‘benefit’ like keeping contact with your family etc. But that’s only an excuse so that you don’t feel like you are really only wasting your time. In reality, they designed a *great* gambling machine. ]
I know libertarianists don’t like this point of view as it undermine some basic principle of their philosophy. But, at the end of the day, I really disagree with the idea that an addicted ‘prefers’ to be addicted because of their revealed preference (it’s also not the right place to discuss THIS concept here – I believe SSC has done a good job in other places, e.g. partially here)
Also, I would like to answer to people wondering: what’s a better system than capitalism?
That’s another thing that really bothers me about libertarianism. Any critique to capitalism is seen as an argument for a more regulated (socialist) society. This is unfair. I am as far away to socialism as possible. I also have an answer to that question.
A better system than just accepting any bullshit capitalism gives us is a system where we actively fight these bullshits. I believe capitalists have the right to try to sell us their ‘gambling machines’, and we have the right to resist them and to spread the idea that what they are selling is addictive and *bad* for us. That’s what I am doing here, btw. If I have good argument to believe that most of the stuff capitalism is giving us nowadays is *not* designed to give us real value, but just fake one, then it becomes almost a moral action to spread this idea.
The need to create new needs (with little or negative value) seems to be linked to IP laws and how bussinesses and people are regulated worldwide. I don’t see it as a downside of libertarianism. More the opposite.
Sure it is. If someone criticizes capitalism for destroying trillions of dollars of wealth in the financial crisis of 2008, it is perfectly legitimate to point out that those trillions of dollars of wealth existed only because of capitalism in the first place.
All of the levels are already saturated. All of them are attracting new businesses. And the claim that you’re taking exception to is Scott saying that most businesses, not most new businesses, don’t make people’s lives worse.
Also, “payed” means “sealed with pitch or tar to prevent leakage”. You probably mean “paid”.
When you say that the alternative to capitalism is us criticizing capitalism, that implies that not allowing criticism is inherent to capitalism, which is anti-capitalism libel. This is one the major issues that I have with anti-capitalism: much of it seems to be based on a vague notion of just what “capitalism” is that simply ascribes everything bad about the world to “capitalism”.
Have you considered that the answer may simply be that different people are possible to addict to different things? Capitalism can’t create an irrational need for shoes or Coke in you, because you don’t care enough about either one. But when it comes to your intellectual curiosity, it can hit you right where you live.
Me, I’m not addictable to shoes either, and I don’t think I drink more Coke than I want to (though if I woke up tomorrow and found out that there was no more Coke ever, I wonder if I would miss it every single time I would otherwise have drunk it? If not, then all those times when I wouldn’t miss it if it didn’t exist but drink it because it does exist are technically times when I’m acting on a manufactured need). And I’ve gotten well and thoroughly sick of clickbaity articles to the point where I think I’d pay to not have to read them. But I’m hopeless about entertainment. When everyone is talking about a new TV show or book or video game, it causes me actual suffering that I haven’t watched, read or played it. If there wasn’t such a barrage of new entertainment all the time, I’d re-watch, re-read and re-play more of the stuff I already have and not be noticably less happy, but instead I feel forced to fork out money to get the latest thing (or else resist with white-knuckle discipline, which still makes me less happy). The various entertainment industries definitely create needs in me and then charge me for filling them.
Capitalism doesn’t have to make everyone an obsessive consumerism in every area. We can’t afford to obsessively consume in every area, anyway. It just needs to make sure that for each person, there is some line of advertisement to target whatever their personal weak spot is.
There is an online video game that I think is sucking all my time. I even wrote a program to play it for me. WTF.
I’m not ready to quit, so this is not a request for assistance, and getting such assistance would add to my life-hassles.
But this whole thing is definitely something that exists.
Exactly. I hope this point sinks in.
ALL advertisement is supposed to work in exactly that way Scott describes: by creating a desire that wouldn’t otherwise exist. It’s just that, for people who spend most of their time on computers and have good adblockers, encountering ads for Coke can be pretty rare. Clickbait is advertising for information. Scott and readers are information-seekers, so clickbait is the one form of advertisement that a) we’re most susceptible to and b) don’t have efficient ad-blockers for yet.
No, it’s supposed to make you aware of a thing you might like.
Three categories of advertisement:
1. Informing or reminding you of a product you would not otherwise have wanted.
2. Persuading you to buy from a particular store instead of a competing store, or buy a particular product instead of one from a competing manufacturer.
3. Giving you information that helps you to buy (for example, telling you where the store is).
I understand that journalism likes to imagine itself as somehow above monetary matters. But they’ve been really, really bad at running it like a business. Indeed, this lack of imagination has led to them compromising content when they didn’t need to.
Following up on a previous comment, let’s imagine that newspapers monetized like a Freemium SaaS. Let’s give them dead average everything: $10 per month, $2 cost per free user acquisition, 12 month retention period (so $120 LTVOC), 4% freemium conversion. Users that don’t subscribe see ads, that generate $4 a year per free user. Let’s ignore upsells, which they should definitely be doing.
An enterprising investor gives them $2,000,000. They hire two web developers/technical types at an average of $100k a year, so $200k. They hire ten journalists/editors at an average of $60k a year (including benefits). They hire three digital marketers for $70k a year, so $210k. They spend split half of the remaining funds into advertising and operational expenses. Let’s say their journalists work 250 days a year (50 weeks a year) and produce an article every day on average. Some are short and take an hour or two, some are in depth and take weeks. But none of them are cheap clickbait. By the end of the year they will have produced a 2,500 high quality stories. If their CAC is constant, they’ll spend $500,000 to get 240,000 free users and 10,000 paid users. The paid users thus generate $100,000 in revenue a month, $1.2 million a year. The free users generate $960,000. The company has a total revenue of $2.16 million, meaning it’s just squeaked by into profitability. It’s not the healthiest business but it’s a solid basis to get more money and scale up. They could achieve respectable profitability by cutting into the general fund, maybe. Or introducing upsells, which they definitely should.
This is obviously a toy model but one could easily construct something more complicated and realistic by looking at the internal stats of a new media company. People do this. Plenty of new media companies operate on this model. But legacy media has largely been trying to stick their finger in a dam. Probably because they lack the structure to focus on this or the institutional knowledge on how to do this.
I think you significantly overestimate how much newspapers can make from advertising these days
$4 a year from ads? Average CPM is $7.60. Assuming 10% of signed up users read each article and there’s a matching number of non-signed up users, the numbers work at that CPM. I don’t think I am.
I recently checked print advertising rates for the WSJ and USA Today. These are paid for by the recipients already. They’re in the $200-250K+ range for half a page. If they aren’t able to get that consistently, presumably they’d lower their rates a bit until they could.
Free papers (print and online) which subsist solely on advertising are also pretty prevalent, so presumably someone is paying to advertise in them.
Now, it’s true that there aren’t as many people who want to read newspapers and thus not as many people who want to advertise in them as well, i.e. demand has decreased over the last few decades, but it still exists.
Part of the issue with revenue is that newspapers/journalists tend to compensate themselves in ways other than money:
1. The prestige of being famous. A NY Times Writer, for example, means you get paid less in cash for that position because other people want to do it for the fame as well.
2. The power of influence, being able to shift society in your ideological direction. Many news sources are started and/or purchased with this as the primary goal, the money is just a way to pay for the causes the owner and staff want to promote by “making a difference” or “speaking truth to power”. They prefer to have more readers/viewers than the less they’d have if they charged more for their content.
One investigation alone can take two years and cost $750,000, I’m not sure how your model is going to support that.
One very specific prestige story is extremely atypical, even at the Atlantic, and the sort of thing that could be done once the company scaled up to have more than ten journalists. No fourteen person operation will have the money to do that under any model. On the other hand, if you 10x these numbers to make it larger (but still smaller than most newspapers) you have five million dollars for them to spend on long investigations like that, which seems like it could sustain that.
I mean, you’ve basically just invented The New Yorker, which has 200-ish editorial staff, a 65/35 subscription/advertising revenue split, and does a mixture of daily stories and big investigations. I am a devoted New Yorker subscriber and wish there were more magazines like it. However, Conde Nast says it is marginally profitable at revenues of $175 million, which suggests the overheads of running a “small” publication with high quality content are a lot bigger than you’ve accounted for.
Yes, I’m sure you could find efficiencies… but over the past decade a lot of private equity guys have bought a lot of newspapers and websites thinking they could find efficiencies – presumably after making back-of-the-envelope calculations like yours – and what inevitably happens is a downward spiral of cutting costs, compromising output, losing readers, and eventual collapse.
Err. No. My version is not fantastically profitable either. Specifically it has a net profit margin of 8%. Which isn’t that bad, honestly, but would not be the huge returns journalism used to be able to get. It certainly doesn’t compare to the profitability of SaaS. But it is sustainable and includes high quality journalism, including those million dollar exposes.
?
Not sure I see the disagreement here. Something similar to your model exists, it’s quite good at what it does, it isn’t super profitable and has issues scaling. The New Yorker is an excellent magazine, but it and others in the same category (I’d throw The Economist in as well) aren’t really compatible with mass internet appeal.
Perhaps I misunderstood. My understanding is Zonulet was claiming that this model couldn’t support high quality journalism and be profitable. My point is that it can and it can even be profitable.
Saying it doesn’t have mass appeal is almost baked in. After all, in depth high quality content isn’t generally easy reading mass appeal stuff anyway. Online publications can definitely do that too (and arguably dominate it). But it’s a different sort of outlet.
Ouch. This post really hurts — I’ve been using paywalls as a source of revenue for my own articles at https://strategy.runetiera.com/. So I thought I’d go through and address these points based on my experience with that.
1) Clickbait: It’s funny. I’ll resent clickbait as a reader, but when I’m writing I genuinely believe that MY article deserves the catchiest title I can give it. I’ve put in a ton of time and effort to write the thing, and it’s super disheartening to watch lower-quality content rise to the top of Reddit just cuz their title is better. I suppose it’s another case of Moloch — everyone else is using the most attention-grabbing tagline they can, so I better do the same just to keep up, to the overall harm of readers everywhere.
2) Becoming part of the discourse: Not as worried about this, as my articles are for a much more niche audience than the general public; they provide strategy advice for a specific video game, so I can’t imagine people suffer much from the inability to access it.
3) Paywall skinner box: I’m pretty guilty of this, in that our site doesn’t clearly delineate between paid and free articles. Mostly this is just laziness on my part, I absolutely want readers to know beforehand whether they’re going to hit a paywall (just even from a self-serving business sense, it would be a good selling point for my users to see “and here is all the fantastic content you get for paying up”. And I’ll probably get around to fixing this, but the items on my TODO are neverending.
My reasoning behind having both paid and free articles in the first place is that once written, articles have an zero marginal cost of replication. It doesn’t matter to me how many copies of my article are shared. I’d prefer to have a ton of people paying for my articles, but failing that I’d prefer to have a ton of free users. I’m sure you understand the addiction of having others engage with the ideas you’ve penned down, and there’s always the hope that my free readers will convert to paying ones.
4) Googleability: I think Google does penalize paywalls, at least in the way that my articles with paywalled content seem to rank much lower than ones without. Which I’m perfectly okay with! My wild guess is that those Coronavirus articles provide a different result to Google’s crawler compared to what they show a user, which I would agree to be bad practice on Google’s side (disclaimer: Xoogler, but I’ve never touched the search side of things)
And then my own points:
The flip side of paywalls, of course, are internet advertisements. The ones that on SSC are notable for how topical and unintrusive they are, but the majority run between “distracting” to “make the site unusable”. Plus, internet ads are increasingly blocked by the end-user, making it less and less of a feasible revenue stream in the first place. Plus user-tracking, malware, privacy etc etc.
Not every site, even with high-quality and original writing, can amass the userbase necessary to attract tasteful sponsors the way SSC does. You propose interventions from search engines, bloggers and users, but how do you think publishers and writers should monetize in the race-to-the-bottom that is our current media environment?
I mind paywalls on domain-specific articles much less than the general “news” ones that get linked and discussed everywhere. That being said, for this kind of content the smart money seems to be on the newsletter / subscription model (e.g. Substack) in preference to public web content. The difference in my mind is that content delivered via email actively resists being shared / linked. The drawback is that your content is less easily discussable / discoverable from outside (i.e. you lose the benefit from points 2 and 4). Writers seem to work around this by providing some content free as a teaser / “sample” so newcomers can discover them; anyone who cares enough about the domain to want more should be subscribed and informed already, not Googling for content.
One unspoken premise of the piece above is that we would probably be better off with less media, and more volunteer media.
SSC doesn’t avoid paywalls because I’ve been able to attract tasteful advertisers (though that helps!), it avoids paywalls because it’s a hobby that I’m lucky enough to make some money off of, not a business. I think if the amount of money going into corporate news decreased by an order of magnitude, enough hobbyists would step up that we would still get good (maybe better!) news.
If I’m wrong about that, then a lot of the rest of the post is counterproductive.
Hobbyists will cover some things well, others less so. Blogs by relevant academics/experts are better than newspapers for analysis. Actual reportage is something less easy for hobbyists to replicate because it is (or can be) very time consuming. It does happen, and local bloggers can break interesting and important stories, but something that takes literally dozens or hundreds of hours to track down is hard to do if it isn’t professional. E.g. court reporters will sit through entire cases, local government journalists will sit through entire legislative sessions. Some people were quite optimistic about citizen journalism but although the amount of money going to corporate news has declined by over 50% so far (in the US since 2005), I’m not sure citizen journalism has really filled the gap.
> I’m not sure citizen journalism has really filled the gap.
This has the hidden assumption that the content which should have been replaced with citizen-journalism is all that valuable in the first place. A lot of what is considered “journalism” isn’t all that valuable. A lot of effort went into covering the OJ Simpson trial and the Michael Jackson trials, but I have a hard time seeing that as “valuable”. Would our lives have been altered in any meaningful way if they had gotten twice the coverage? Or relegated to a 15-second spot at the conclusion?
Ah, I made that assumption explicit originally but deleted it from the eventual comment. I agree that court reporting might be pointless for many stories. An especially ridiculous aspect of those two trials is how many separate publications were there, filing basically the same story (which is admittedly why wire copy exists and is used in other situations).
There are blogs and podcasts that are much better at reporting science/technology news in their area of expertise than any news site. But I don’t know how you get consistent local reporting—someone going to every city council meeting and knowing the players and reporting on what’s going on—without either paying for it or accepting that it will be done only by people with an agenda that motivates their work.
I’m curious how you rate the chances of a story like this one – which three New York Times reporters spent nine months investigating across nine different countries, and which caused real political change – being pulled off by hobbyists.
I think that’s a really important point. Amateurs can do an excellent job of moving information from the internet to people’s brains, but moving it from reality to the internet is something full-time professionals do much better.
This is actually already a solved problem, they are called commercial research firms. Fusion GPS is probably the most famous one as they were the ones who organized the Steele Dossier, but there are many.
This isn’t actually all that different than the Times investigative journalism division (many of these people were hired away from the press), because the investigative journalism division doesn’t make the Times any money. Its a charity that is subsidized by its cheap journalism (which is actually often just getting tips from commercial research firms), and the opinion division. Its no different than how the girls softball team is a charity that is paid for by men’s football at your major colleges.
It’s interesting to think of investigative reporting as a luxury prestige operation cross-subsidized by the newspaper business when it was still profitable. It’s like Bell Labs—a world class research lab that was maintained as a prestige project by AT&T when they still had the interstate telephony monopoly in the US. Changes in technology made competition workable, and a court decision ended their legal monopoly. Soon thereafter, Bell Labs became a shadow of what it had been—AT&T simply could not support a world class research lab from their excess profits anymore.
I’ve actually found it to be a very helpful mental model once I first identified it in the college sports area. Because one of the common comebacks against paying “the players” is that they’d have no money for other sports. One day it just dawned on me that they didn’t really have to have those other sports, they were just a charity that they wanted to have. Once you have the mental model you see it fits with a lot of businesses.
They need the other sports to satisfy nondiscrimination law.
Title IX requires women’s football but does it require tennis?
Title IX does not require women’s football, and women’s football basically does not exist at the college level. Title IX requires, to a first approximation, that each college have about the same number of female athletes as male athletes, integrated across all sports. Since almost no women want to play college football and almost nobody wants to watch women play football, colleges that want to have men’s football teams (i.e. colleges that want their alumni to donate money), have to have other sports that attract predominantly female student-athletes to compensate.
If they blow all their sweet alumni dollars on paid male football players, to the extent that they can’t afford e.g. bus fare to send the women on the tennis team to away matches, they get shut down for Title IX violation. This is at least a semi-plausible excuse for not paying the male football players.
I agree investigative journalism is the most difficult counterexample to what I’m saying. I’m not sure whether it could be done on a Patreon-like or charity-like model. ProPublica seems to already do something like this. I also don’t have a good sense of how much investigative reporting there is, how important it is, or how much impact it has (including how much negative impact).
Again, its not. People pay for it all the time. Most often for nefarious means (but this is no different than the Times or Post, we just pretend they aren’t doing a selfish thing when they are), but independent investigators for such stories are common, and would put the $750k price point to shame.
The Steele Dossier, which is a clownish document that probably took less than 100 hours to compile and assemble cost Perkins Coie over a million dollars. They probably billed that out to the buyers at double that, minimum.
Investigative journalists are not Lois Lane and Clark Kent, though that may be the fantasy. And promoting investigative journalism is as much a way for a news media outlet to win prizes in its field and thus accrue status which goes towards marketing (every radio station I listen to has an ad about ‘By market research we’re the largest X in market Y, we’re winners of Prize Z, so we can guarantee you M thousands of listeners, call our ad department now to book a slot!’) and which captures public interest so sells more dead tree copies/online views.
Chasing after sensational stories boosts sales, and if you can wrap that in a cover of “public service” then you can pat yourself on the back for your virtue as well.
This is a pretty huge deal unspoken premise, no?
I tend to find that even for tasks that are frequently undertaken both eagerly and decently competently by volunteers, you tend to find that the best versions of the task are executed by people who are paid to do it full time, and that the community of people using it tends to recognize this.
(Take organizing chess tournaments as an example; while there are many lovely volunteer-organized tournaments, by far the largest, best run, and most exciting are organized by paid professionals, and player-hobbyists clearly show that they recognize this by which tournaments they prioritize attending.)
Hobbyists produce plenty of great opinion journalism and niche community journalism, but if you want e.g. war reporting or investigations of local government or really anything that involves someone spending a large part of their day making boring phone calls to track down information it seems pretty likely to me you’re gonna get a far better version of that by paying someone to do it as their job.
And if you disagree with that, it’s a big enough point that it should really be the piece, or at least an introductory piece, rather than an unspoken premise.
I’ve seen really really good stuff produced by hobbyists, outclassing the paid professionals. It’s not the norm, but it happens.
Sometimes the result is that someone hires the hobbyists, or otherwise throws money at them. Sometimes the result is that the professionals drastically improve their game, because they can no longer sell against free competition.
I’m most aware of this in software, where, to a first approximation, anything Richard Stallman personally produced was better than his paid competition. I point in particular to the gnu c compiler, which basically introduced the Unix world to effective optimization techniques – before that, vendors just passed along the ancient “portable c compiler”.
I could find other examples too, but GCC was so much better that the non-free competition basically blew away; people used the vendor’s compiler just once – to build gcc – and then never used it again. Eventually HP got it together to create a good compiler team, and eventually that team became able to beat GCC for the same source code/hardware combination, but it took years to reach that point, and gcc wasn’t standing still. (Presumably other vendors did the same, but I was using HP equipment during the relevant period.)
Of course it helped that random compiler theory graduate students used gcc as (a) a starting place to implement their thesis project and (b) a way to advertise their excellence as a compiler developer, in hopes of getting hired as a non-volunteer.
But to see the same thing in journalism, we’d probably need some brilliant fanatics (like Stallman), and a path for volunteers to benefit from contributing.
There’s a lot of places where free software is best-of-breed, but there are a lot of places where it just sucks. There’s cachet in being one of the gcc developers, but no one can name any person on the net-snmp team.
@Edward Scizorhands/DinoNerd
Also, while I don’t claim to have extensive knowledge of the free software world, in postgres where I’m most familiar a lot of committers are in highly paid jobs as postgres experts where their contribution to helping maintain the software are part of their full time job, and clients hire their company in part because they keep that kind of expert on staff. It’s a unique world.
I feel like this assumption might be driven by a typical mind fallacy. Your blog is hands down the #1 most productive and thoughtful “hobby” blog I read. Many others that I enjoy deeply have authors who have explicitly quit writing because their day job took up too much time and they could not afford to create quality content anymore. This suggests that relying on unpaid volunteers to generate all content will, at best, mean many talented voices are unable to contribute, and, at worst, mean entire sectors of news/topics go unreported. And I fear deeply that the unprofitable boring news will be the first cut, so “less corporate news” would mean “less news” and “more clickbait listicles.”
Moreover, the literal violent attacks on news reporters caught in film in the last week feel like the culmination of years of the media being denigrated, and I find you echoing that extremely disheartening. I think a professional, paid group of people with ethical standards (fact checkers) and explicit training to do so accurately and effectively is exactly what we need more of. And if that doesn’t sound like “corporate media” to you, I would guess the declining profits at major media companies that have led to absolutely devastating layoffs over the last decade might contribute to the remaining sources declining in quality – and hiding and minimizing the use of paywalls feels like this would make things worse, not better.
All that is to say: I expect to pay for quality content, and paywalls are an annoying way to enforce that, but one I don’t see many good alternatives to.
I should write a post about this, but I am really against the idea that somebody denigrating a group can be held responsible (even in a weak way) for violence against that group.
If someone assassinates Trump, was everyone who said Trump was an evil person and a threat to democracy at fault? Causally, yes, they contributed. Morally, no, you should feel free to say as many bad things about Trump as you want, it’s your civic duty to do so, and if someone else acts violently, that’s on them.
Or same thing with police officers. To echo your language, there were recently a lot of literal violent attacks on police officers (including some murders), this is the culmination of years of the police being denigrated, and I am sure that those two things are causally connected. That doesn’t mean it should be beyond the pale to criticize police. People should say what they believe and not be violent, and if some people are violent, that doesn’t negatively reflect on the people who said what they believed.
In the same way, I think it’s my civic duty to criticize the media when I think it’s worthy of criticism, and if some other people do things I don’t endorse, I don’t endorse that.
I think this depends on the way the denigrating is done.
If you spread the idea that Jews are killing Christian babies for their blood, I think you have some responsibility for any resulting violence against Jews.
I’d generalize to most cases where someone is being painted as a complete monster where even tolerating them is outside the Overton Window. “I disagree with Trump” will not result on many attacks on people with MAGA hats”. “Trump is a racist monster and all his supporters are Nazis” forseeably will.
Sorry, I was not clear on the directionality of that statement. I don’t think your opinions are in any way implicated in attacks on journalists. I think the culture of attacking journalists is implicated in statements such as “I would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist.” There’s plenty to hate in corporate media! But as other commenters point out (many journalists themselves), paywalls are one of the few things allowing GOOD journalists to continue doing what they do. And because you don’t discuss an alternative (other than “be super rich and/or exceptionally productive,” options unavailable to many), this post comes off as a deeper dislike of the entire profession, rather than a criticism of a specific practice.
If I said “charging for access to mental health is bad because it denies people who can’t afford it. Also many psychiatrists are crap and their practices make people’s lives worse” – that seems like an opinion we can discuss. But if I follow it with “the solution is, the world would be vastly better off if we just didn’t pay psychiatrists at all, and it’s ok because plenty of untrained hobby psychiatrists will step up to fill that role as volunteers, especially in the hard cases where it’s needed most,” you would likely laugh in my face. I understand the point that clickbait has negative externalities, so this is an imperfect analogy. But #NotAllMedia is clickbait, and the “hobby journalist” solution does not seem realistic to me.
If journalists are not held in such high esteem that the police refrain from beating them, perhaps the fact that the police beat non-high esteem people should be of greater concern than the fact that journalists are no longer of sufficiently high esteem to avoid the violence that normal people are exposed to? Perhaps their lack of esteem is to some extent a positive insofar as that it fails to insulate them from the real world, which is, after all, what they’re supposed to be informing us about.
There’s certainly some “how dare you beat us?” going on.
But in many cases journalists are exempt from the dispersal orders by decree, yet the cops on the ground aren’t following their orders.
Cops beating up journalists is a huge red flag because, presumably, zero journalists are secret looters/rioters. The police have no grounds to be hurting them under cover of curtailing supposed protester violence/crime.
I hate paywalls too, and evade them when I can. But I’m very sympathetic to newspapers needing money to create good content. This recent article on how the USA and Mexico together fund a Panamanian lab to release millions of sterile screwflies to prevent screwflies invading North America was excellent, and sounds expensive to produce (the reporter flew to Panama). I wish there was a better solution to this, and I feel conflicted about evading paywalls.
Can there be a solution to this? As Paul Graham said to a WSJ editor earlier this year, newspapers want to be Netflix (i.e. have a subscription model) but they’re one show on Netflix. Maybe there’s some possible company that would be the newspaper equivalent to Netflix that gives access to many of them.
Some companies are trying. Apple news is basically this.
https://digiday.com/media/publishers-grapple-apples-news-subscription-service/
(Digiday is soft-paywalled, naturally).
There’s another called Blendle and a a few others
Publishers generally aren’t that enthusiastic. With a company like Apple, they’re putting themselves in a commercial relationship where they’re definitely the weaker partner. And it’s not clear that in the long term this is beneficial for publishers.
I think effective altruism could easily fund its own news. Future Perfect is funded by a grant, and if Vox (and the Atlantic, etc) didn’t exist, I trust people to throw enough money at EA news to make sure the appropriate things get covered.
I realize there’s a distortion if only things people want to fund get covered, but I’m not sure it’s as much of a distortion as right now where only things people want to read get covered.
It seems to me like the solution is a Spotify type model, where you give money to one centralized company, and they dole it out to the news sources you read based on how long you spend on each one. But I assume a thousand people have already debated all the pros and cons of that ad nauseam and there’s some good reason they’re not doing it, so I didn’t bother getting into it on the post.
Arguably Patreon can accomplish the funding of news the same way it funds a host of other content creation; one example being the video game website Easy Allies, which takes in $40k a month through patreon, which while not technically a traditional video games news site is largely in the same area.
If a core of journalists from X newspaper got together to launch their own patreon funded website, could they not draw enough income from patrons to provide regular pieces?
Doesn’t this incentivize unnecessarily long articles?
Only if they keep your attention.
There are at least three companies trying to do this.
Apple News basically works on this model, albeit only inside the Apple News app.
The Brave web browser also keeps track of what you browse and has the option to dole out money to the sites you spend time on, although in the form of a somewhat dubious cryptocurrency that they created, and which they will give to you in exchange for viewing other ads.
There is also a company called Scroll that has partnerships with quite a few major online news companies (The Atlantic, Vox, most of the old Gawker sites) that works on this model. They charge $5 a month, and if you have their app/browser extension installed, then when you visit these sites, they will serve you a different copy of the pages without ads or trackers. The $5 gets split according to how much time you spend on each site.
Who knows if any of these companies will succeed. Having watched non-tech-savvy people use computers, it’s very disheartening. Weird, predatory ads seem to work really well, and people don’t seem to care about or be bothered by them.
The irony there is that the WSJ editor was asking “are there non-auto renewing subscriptions?” and mentioned Netflix amongst others, but Netflix will let you cancel your subscription online on the website with little to no hassle. The WSJ asks you to call a phone number and speak to someone whose job is to try to persuade you not to cancel and to make it as tedious and difficult as possible to cancel the subscription.
If the WSJ operated the same level of “easy to subscribe, easy to cancel”, there might be more people willing to subscribe. But very few people are going to pony up a monthly subscription for “I might read two or three articles in a year”. Personally, if I click on an interesting (or sufficiently clickbaity) headline and it brings me to a paywall, I don’t bother going any further because I’m not paying to read one article, and I’m not subscribing to a publication I know I will not read in its entirety.
In fact, Netflix actively cancels the subscriptions of people who haven’t used the service in a while and refunds the money. I guess they’re in a strong enough position that they can afford to be customer friendly.
I assume that once you subscribe to a paywall site, it’s fairly invisible to you, so I don’t think Tyler is intentionally obscuring paywall status from his readers, I assume he just doesn’t notice. He does flag NYT articles usually, but I think that’s for tribal, not paywall reasons.
Note: this may be too charitable considering his behavior regarding the frequent nonchalant links to PDFs, which it seems impossible for him not to notice.
Why shouldn’t one nonchalantly link to PDFs?
10 years ago it was a big problem. PDF readers are big and often break.
Not as much of a problem today.
I suspect that he doesn’t give away the point of the articles he lists because he doesn’t want to “steal” that click from the source. Yeah, he could put “Some guys point guns at their dicks to troll newbs”, but then nobody would click on the link, and Vice would miss out on that revenue, eventually leading to them going out of business or instituting a paywall.
Similarly, I’ve never used an adblocker, and I’ve always encouraged other people to not use them either. My thinking was that if there are no ads, then everything will have to move behind a paywall, and htat seems to be what’s happening.
Note that because of these sorts of issues, it’s good practice to visit a page in incognito mode before sharing a link.
Props to Scott for #3 here! I think that for most people who sympathize with this post, one ought to enforce a very strict diet of no clickbait – don’t click on it, don’t read it, downvote/dislike it wherever it appears, and if you absolutely must spread vital information through some clickbaited source, then give away all of the spoilers and encourage any potential readers to turn on their adblockers. Every time you click on worthless pieces of clickbait, you are teaching every headline-writer that this is what makes money and making the internet a slightly worse place. (And spread these norms further, so that other people take up the cause!)
Using clickbait titles is an admission that if you actually told your readers what your content was about, they would not want it, so you must lie to them or omit information in order to get them to pay you for your needlessly inefficient delivery of information. Interesting opaque titles are fine (see: half of SSC posts), but if the entire point is to provoke curiosity that could be satisfied in a few words, you are taking a giant dump on the social commons.
Was Scott guilty of taking a giant dump on the social commons with Meditations on Moloch and Untitled?
I’m not in favor of all titles being maximally descriptive of their content; “Meditations on Moloch” is a much snappier title than “On the benefits of personifying the abstract concept of coordination problems and civilizational dysfunction”, and (not) titling Untitled conveys real information about the intended tone of the piece. Weird titles that don’t summarize their contents are fine, if that improves the experience of reading it in some way! But “You won’t believe what THIS new study found out about bacon!!11!” is not written to improve any part of the reader’s experience, only to make them suffer if they don’t click.
I actually avoided both of those articles for quite a while in favor of ones that had more descriptive titles, simply because they don’t appeal to any existing preference or create a new one.
They’re rather the opposite of clickbait.
Me in the 1990s: Free software? That will mean everything you do with a computer will come with annoying ads.
Me in the 2000s: I have a strange new respect for this free stuff.
Me in the 2010s: I may have been right the first time.
I have a handy little piece of mental software that makes me instantly hate any content source that tries to clickbait me. Mind this doesn’t mean I never get clickbaited, but it usually works fairly well; I’ve even prevented myself from watching videos from content creators I actively enjoy, that weren’t really clickbait* (just had clickbaity titles), out of sheer righteous fury.
Recommended!
*…though of course the fact that I know this means that I did, eventually, watch the video(s).
I’m like this with paywalls. Honestly I make enough money that I could subscribe to any site whose paywall I find annoying, but that would be letting them win.
If it were a model that felt fair – like “click here once to pay 10 cents (via some microtransaction framework that gives away no personal info to the site) and read the article immediately” then I think I would do it without hesitation.
Oh god, I thought I was the only one. I am (relatively) safe from clickbait titles causing curiosity because they cause fury instead. It might be worse, because curiosity would be satisfied by reading but the fury doesn’t go away!
While reading through part I, I found myself asking: “What makes this different from the era of printed newspapers?” After all, we used to pay NYT or WSJ or the now-struggling local paper for a hard copy every morning. In fact we paid substantially more than the paywalls cost now. What changed?
Here are my attempts at answering.
1) In the paper model, clickbait wasn’t possible, because there was no practical way for the newspaper to deliver the headline, transact with you for the rest of the article, and then deliver the rest of the article, all in a timely manner. The papers’ main revenue model was long term subscription (and ads). The closest they got to what I’m describing is the coin-operated newspaper rack, and tabloids did in fact take advantage of that model (which I assume was a larger fraction of revenue for them) by putting sensational headlines “above the fold”. So the clickbait problem has been around since before paywalls; the main difference is that “respectable” sources of journalism are now moving toward it and away from long-term customer relationships.
2) In the print era newspaper articles (and articles in magazine-like publications) didn’t really become “part of the discourse”, because there was no discourse– at least in the sense Twitter’s taught us to expect. How exactly would one reference, let alone link, an article in print? People generally didn’t, because there was no point; not everyone would have subscribed to that paper, and even fewer would have kept or clipped the article, and fewer yet would have it ready to hand when the topic came up. There were certain circles of professionals in which one *could* expect some version of this– e.g. everyone in the business world would get the WSJ, or at least have access to a copy somewhere (e.g. a library or office) in a pinch– but even then the discussion would be about the news the articles communicated, not how they contributed to a “discourse”.
3) was mostly a non-issue due to 2); no one expected you to know or care what some news source you weren’t subscribed to had said. If it was important for research etc. you could always dig up a copy somewhere anyway.
4) was entirely a non-issue because there was no Google and no expectation that one could easily gather information this way. It was the newspaper’s job to bring the relevant information to you.
Points 2-4 suggest that paywalls are annoying primarily because we now have higher expectations about the availability and relevance of information. Additionally, 1-2 point to competition from literally free news sources (facing greatly reduced marginal costs thanks to the Internet) changing newspaper behavior. None of this invalidates what Scott said, but it helps put the irritation in perspective. Compared to what we have today, print newspapers were horrifically expensive, wasteful, and difficult to use effectively.
“The discourse” was totally a thing. Check out Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities, and the role that newspapers and pamphlets played in standardizing national languages and creating the modern nation-state as the set of people you were in discourse with through this set of shared papers one reads.
There’s something a little ironic about citing a book (that most people won’t own or have read) in response to a comment about print media on an article complaining about paywalls. 🙂
I agree that the discourse was a thing; what I should have said is that Twitter et al. have made it *much more* of a thing in terms of reach (it affects more people) and depth (people spend more time on it) and pace (new content gets incorporated in a matter of hours rather than days, which greatly affects how people engage with it).
Oh, I don’t deny that there’s a qualitatively changed Discourse now that it happens on a timescale of hours rather than weeks, and reaches everyone with internet, rather than everyone who can buy a print copy of a pamphlet. I’m just pointing out that many of the dynamics are in fact long-established and played a major role in things like the French and American revolutions, and not all of them are totally new.
Everybody with any pretensions to being “part of the discourse” would have subscribed to that paper, because that paper is literally the only one in town and to not subscribe would be roughly akin to not having a computer or a smartphone today. Or sometimes there were two newspapers, but they were explicitly divided on tribal lines and you subscribed to your tribe’s paper and didn’t talk to the other tribe.
If you had any pretensions to being part of the national discourse, you subscribed to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as well as the local paper, again according to your tribe.
All the other newspapers in the world combined, were of no relevance. “The discourse” in Chicago, was never about local events in Nashville – and if something in Nashville ever did rise to that level of importance, the Chicago Tribune would cover it and everybody in Chicago who wanted to talk about it would talk about the Tribune’s version. Or, if they were talking to their cosmopolitan friends from out of town, the New York Times’ version.
Without the ability to insta-link to every regional newspaper, news magazine, blog, or rando with a social media account, stories fell into three basic categories.
Local news of purely local importance, which outsiders didn’t talk about because it wasn’t their business and it was too tediously difficult to make it their business,
Local news of idiosyncratic importance to a scattered few, in which case either it gets published in the trade press or your friend who realizes that you’d be weirdly interested in this story knows that he needs to actually send you a clipping, and
News of broad interest, which gets printed in the New York Times and which goes out over the wire services so that local newspapers can print locally optimized but substantially identical versions of the story.
Whichever category it fits into, everybody who counts it as part of their discourse gets about the same story to work from.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! hnau erases newsies! Flat caps and 90’s musicals beware!
Of course it is possible. That’s what the front cover is for. And don’t forget newspaper hawkers.
Indeed. That’s what I was trying to get at with the second half of that paragraph.
You mean you’d sometimes want a drink with two Cadbury Eggs’ worth of sugar in it even if no company making it existed in the first place?
People have been drinking extremely sweet drinks for a very long time. Mead dates back close to 10,000 years. Mixing milk and honey is mentioned in the Bible.
Coca-Cola definitely didn’t create this preference.
This is a tough question to answer. I’m sure the ancient Romans didn’t sit around being sad because they didn’t have computers, but I don’t think that means computers weren’t a real quality-of-life improvement.
I wonder is there a direct chain of dreamed-of but initially infeasible improvements from devices that existed in Ancient Times (let us accept Antikythera mechanism as an authentic mechanical calculation tool) to modern computers. Probably yes, and probably not even so long.
I think this is an important point, which directly contradicts the conventional Rationalist wisdom of, “hunter-gatherer societies were so much better off than we are”. If you asked an Ancient Roman whether he’d like to a computer, he’d just stare at you blankly. Computers are simply outside of his frame of reference. But computers have drastically expanded the frame of reference available to us modern humans. If you asked the Ancient Roman, “would you like to have magical mental powers”, he’d likely say “yes”.
In what sense are you using the word “Rationalist” here?
Can’t get clickbaited if you don’t have computers!
Also, juice has been around for a long time (and people really overestimate the “healthiness” of juice, just because it’s natural).
Newspapers need to move to a “cancellation insurance” business model, where they sell insurance to anyone who uses social media. If the person gets cancelled, then a reporter from the newspaper will investigate the details of their case, promise to write a fair and evenhanded account of what’s going on, and also give them a cash prize if a jury of some sort determines they were wrongly cancelled / the public shaming punishment exceeds the crime.
Cancellation insurance could be huge. Everyone will want to buy it. Even though cancellation is a relatively rare event, just like lightning strikes it is very mentally available. The massive revenue from cancellation insurance subscriptions could easily fund all of the newspaper’s other reporting as a marketing expense. And the great thing is that the cancellation insurance model creates an incentive for their other reporting to be well-sourced and trustworthy: If it isn’t, you will vote with your dollars and buy insurance from some other firm.
I’ve thought about this a lot and could probably write an entire article’s worth of material about it, but I don’t have a blog like Scott’s to get the word out. If anyone wants to talk more about this reach out to raisinjuice@gmail.com
How do you imagine the transition working? Suppose we accept that huge numbers of people would eventually want to buy cancellation insurance once they came round to the idea, saw that it worked, concluded it no longer seemed socially weird and so on. Surely you agree that this will take some time, and in the interim the subscriptions will only be taken out by a small number of people heavily selected for their likelihood of being cancelled? A version of the Tumblr for witches problem, if you like. Are newspapers just supposed to grit their teeth and eat vast losses on this stage to get to the sunlit uplands of universal cancellation coverage, in the face of what may very well be a huge first mover penalty?
As the insurance provider, you can charge a different premium based on estimated likelihood of cancellation.
This is Twitter. There is an upper-echelon of people who are friends with journalists and could get their side of the story out if there were an attempt to cancel them. A second-tier of people are friends with that upper-echelon.
So you’re saying that reputational services are available, but through an informal marketplace. Seems to me that making this into a formal marketplace could unlock a lot of value.
I don’t think this would have the effect of making reporting more fair and even handed. It would just make people subscribe to the news source that is most biased in their direction. Leftists want cancel insurance through MSNBC, rightists want cancel insurance through Fox. You want the source that is going to be most biased on your direction (and also has a readership most biased in your direction), not and objective observer who might disagree with you.
And additionally, you want a source capable of damaging your accusers in the eyes of you social circle, which again means something ideologically similar to your social circle.
Or alternatively, maybe you’d like to be able to damage your accusers in the eyes of THEIR social circle (as a credible deterrent say), in which case you’d want to buy insurance with a firm that can do that.
Well, you want to prevent being backstabbed in your circle. If their circle is far enough and nobody in yours is buying their bullshit, I am pretty sure the insurer will not recognise such events as cancellations because it is just the normal part of everyday polarisation.
See also: Maersk, NotPetya and Zurich Insurance Group declaring the damage from this malware uncovered as they consider it to be an act of electronic warfare.
Not necessarily. If you think your “team” is already gonna believe that you are good, then the best insurance is through a service that can persuade the other team.
That’s the source that’s likely to be on your side anyways
Being “cancelled”, a “fair account”, and “wrongly cancelled” are all subjective states of affairs, which makes it very difficult to insure. And if you feel they’ve abridged their obligations to you, well, you’re a social pariah, so who are you going to get you to listen to you? And if the mob is against you, why would 12 randomly selected people from that mob be expected to have an opinion different from that mob? Furthermore, being known to have the insurance would likely be rather bad PR.
The insurance firm could put together a jury of randomly composed members of the public to evaluate your case. The broader idea here is “anarcho-capitalism for reputations”–a competitive marketplace for judicial processes. There are any number of processes that could be used to determine whether a payout results.
Social pariahs still get a lot of attention. If a social pariah says something bad about their insurance firm, that will tell potential customers that the insurance firm can’t protect them if they become a pariah.
The model here is that the mob is self-selecting from a very small slice of the population. This is why e.g. an opinion can be overwhelmingly dominant on Twitter yet only be shared by a small fraction of the population according to polls.
I’m not totally sure it would. The mob might not go after someone if it’s likely to result in a payout. But if so… just don’t tell people you have it.
Sounds like the mafia
And “pay your taxes and receive police protection in return” does not? Government is a stationary bandit.
I’m pretty sure pages with real paywalls (as in, the server truly will not send you the text unless you are logged in), rather than the pseudo-paywalls you see on newspapers, do not show up in search engines. My understanding is that newspapers’ pseudo-paywalls (where they send you the text but then hide it) were invented precisely so that they’d act as a paywall to most humans while still showing up in search engines (because a web crawler doesn’t care that the text gets hidden at some point as long as it received it). I think there’s a bit more history here as to how this all played out, but I’m not too familiar with it. Does anyone know the history in more detail here?
I believe that is false. Some actually paywalled articles do show up in web searches. This is because the publishers of those articles try to guess which requests come from search engines, and serving the article for free to them. I see this mostly in scientific scholarly publication, but it probably also happens for clickbait news sites too, I just don’t look for those much. And yes, this has led to an arms war, where search engines in term sometimes try to masquarade their requests to pretend they are the sort of users to whom the website does not want to serve the article for free.
Surely there’s a stronger incentive to engage in the arms war the other way? That is, users making their requests look like they come from search engines. I guess the vast majority of users are far less technically sophisticated than search engines so this part is negligible, and also I imagine if this was through a whitelist of IP addresses it would be hard to spoof.
“where search engines in term” I’m not sure whether this is a typo for “turn”, or you think that “in term” is the idiom.
I don’t have the time to dig through all the hits and find the best one, but searching “google first click free” should get the history.
ETA: found the article I remembered. From the Times, on Medium.Here’s the article.
But what a lot of magazines are doing is way worse. I might be reading an article in some non-paywalled journal. Then it makes a factual claim, without providing the facts, but linking to a paywalled journal.
When Politician X lied about outrageous claim (hyperlink), they proved they are completely untrustworthy.I then click on the hyperlink, and discover it’s behind a paywall. This means, effectively, that I can’t test your claim, or check its veracity, without paying for that magazine. And sometimes it happens from a magazine that I already paid for (the FT links to the WSJ, for example). Just don’t do that, or at least give me a trigger warning:
We are going to make claims that are backed up by sources behind a paywall. If you don't want to be outraged and triggered by your inability to verify what we say without paying for a magazine you don't subscribe to and don't want to subscribe to, don't read this article.Obviously journal paywalls are terrible, but sci-hub has become so universal that I don’t even notice the problem anymore.
A sci-hub for newspaper articles would be amazing (and hilarious to watch) but I’m not holding my breath.
@Scott Alexander:
> A sci-hub for newspaper articles would be amazing (and hilarious to watch) but I’m not holding my breath.
As I mention in my other comment here, I think that http://archive.is (aka http://archive.today) is functionally this. I don’t think they are (ab)using academic subscriptions for access, but they act as a public repository for articles with approximately the same legal status. Note that they are unrelated to http://archive.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today.
Note to anyone else who can’t reach archive.is — it won’t work with CloudFlare’s excellent DNS server (1.1.1.1). You’ll have to switch to another DNS server or use a more technical solution like putting the numeric IP in
/etc/hosts.archive.is doesn’t work for me, I get an error referencing CloudFlare. Can you explain in more detail what I need to do? I don’t know how to switch to another DNS server. I can locate the /etc/hosts file on my Mac, and think I can edit it – but what should it look like?
@Dino:
You would add a line of the form “94.16.117.236 archive.is” to the /etc/hosts file. It’s possible that this address might change over time. You can use “dig archive.is @8.8.8.8” to verify the current address.
Alternatively, you could change the overall DNS resolution to use Google’s 8.8.8.8 servers. Instructions here: https://serverguy.com/kb/change-dns-server-settings-mac-os/.
Making changes of this sort may or may not be a good idea. Depending on your level of technical savvy and your ability to follow complex and poorly written instructions found online, it’s possible that you could mess up your computer to the point that you need to reinstall the OS. Be cautious.
I live with paywalls. I know some elementary ways of getting around them, and if a site is too firmly paywalled (The Economist and the Wall Street Journal), I live without reading it. If I had more money, I might subscribe to the Economist.
I *hate* clickbait. If I link to a clickbait headline, I include a summery so no one else has to read it.
I guess I’m unique here, in that I actually pay for the New York Times, and I’m very happy to do so because they do amazing work. I assume Scott is being at least partially flippant when he says he “would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist”, although I can’t quite tell. In that world, without well-resourced investigative journalists, bad actors at every level of society would have absolutely free rein and it would affect all of us.
I pay for the NYT, for the reasons you state. I also pay for the Economist for the same reasons.
Moreover, I am eager to pay for any site I want to read that will let me avoid ads by doing so. I would pay Scott to avoid ads, if it came to it. Because the way Scott hates paywalls, I hate advertising. I never watched tv shows until I could get the dvd or stream them without ads. It’s not a ‘position’, it’s the way I felt about ads since I was a kid, they are manipulative and disruptive and annoying.
A newsletter I follow in my professional life (SANS NewsBites) pursues option #5, usually by adding a sentence like “Please note that the WSJ link is behind a paywall”. I find this very useful and frustration-reducing.
I don’t read enough news articles in general for a subscription to ever be worth it for me, which I think is a bit of a shame, because I’d love to support some of these sites anyway. Ideally in a world where they don’t stop people who don’t from viewing their content, but still. I wonder if someone could create a meta-service to subscribe to that itself was subscribed to all these sites (or at least most of them) to proportional degree to how many people actually read (to the end, to avoid being in turn gamed by clickbait and encouraging it) their articles.
…I wonder, all of a sudden, maybe such a thing already exists and I didn’t find it because I didn’t look for it. I guess it would have to be something comparable in workflow to how so many sites let you pay with PayPal – if you’ve never heard of PayPal before, you can sign up right there! In this case, if you’ve never heard of UnlockedJournalism, instead of subscribing to this site individually, you can also sign up with UnlockedJournalism right now and read the article. That sort of thing.
For the record, I love your links collections in part precisely because I’m not hassled to click them! You make excellent summaries and if I want to know more, I click through. Contrast with my IRC channel, where some people might occasionally throw in a youtube link without any commentary – I don’t click those at all, because no one’s given me an incentive to, and I’ve pointed this out to people (assuming I have reason to believe they care that I click, because they want commentary), and this has improved things. So, thank you for making me Not Click and for finding all these interesting things on the internet! 🙂
This is sort of what I was hoping Apple News+ could turn into. The parts are mostly there, but the experience of landing on, say, a paywalled WSJ article, to actually finding it in the app is painful. That part seems like the sort of thing that a browser extension could help with (or Apple making the search feature merely awful instead of all but unusable in the case of trying to locate a specific article).
But then there are the some gaping holes in which magazines/articles are available. This is probably a necessary part of the business model, like health insurance provider networks and cable TV packages (there needs to be a credible threat of the aggregator saying “nope, too expensive” and leaving out a particular provider).
The dream for me as a consumer is something like the streaming music model, where you can find and read almost anything for a very reasonable monthly fee (I realize this hasn’t exactly been a dream for the overwhelming majority of artists who get paid peanuts even for a sizable number of streams).
Or perhaps something like a mechanical license (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license) for news?
Or even micropayments? I read an article/thread somewhere that what we pay in bandwidth, mobile data, and battery life to read a tracker-and-ad-festooned article on the web is something like an order of magnitude more than we would have to pay directly to net the publisher the same amount of money.
I also find paywalls annoying, but I feel like they’re a necessary evil since the profitability of purely ad supported models has absolutely crashed. And we need some way to fund journalism in order to get content I like, and to perform their important social role exposes abuse of power and other issues
This. Online ads are also terrible (and widely avoided for this reason). This means that in many cases there is no viable source of revenue for journalism on the internet.
Lots of commenters here seem to like hating on the mainstream media (with some justification in particular cases), but a world without the media isn’t obviously better overall.
If you are want to read a paywalled article, are willing to add an additional step, it’s worth knowing that you can often get access by pasting the URL into “archive.is” (and likely many other similar sites). If someone has already previously done this for the URL in question, you will be redirected to a cached copy. If not, a copy will be created and a new URL issued.
For the example of the Wall Street Journal article “Lockdowns vs. the Vulnerable” (of which Scott says “you cannot read it without paying $19.50/month”) can be read for free by pasting the URL into http://archive.is. This also generates a sharable link (http://archive.is/NqJwX) that can directly be used by others. At a glance, it seems like a reasonable opinion piece with some good points.
I’d be interested in hearing how this paywall avoidance approach works behind the scenes. I’d guess that they are retrieving the article by (illegally?) pretending to be Google (or some other search engine), then creating their own copy of the article that they redistribute in blatant violation of copyright. Or is there some way in which their approach is actually legal? Separately, how guilty should one feel about using such a service?
The article sees coronavirus as a problem only for old people. As far as I know, old people are in greatest danger, but young people can also get sick and sometimes die. And if you go with the “herd immunity” strategy, it means lots of infected and dead young people.
(By the way, this kinda reminds me how people didn’t take HIV seriously, when it was seen as a problem only for gays. Frame a sickness as something that only affects an outgroup, and most people will shrug and ignore it.)
Which country are they talking about? Because in countries that succeeded to keep the infection rate low, the benefit of shutdowns was that it didn’t get anywhere near most of the nursing homes. Ah yes, USA. I suppose the lesson is that shutdowns don’t have the expected effect when they are too late and half-assed, but this is probably not what the author wanted to say.
False dilemma. The reopening can be gradual, not necessarily complete, and definitely does not have to mean “becoming Swedish”. You could reopen the economy, but keep washing your hands, etc.
tl;dr — the usual fatalism, completely ignoring outcomes of countries that are neither USA nor Sweden (hint: most of those countries have way better outcomes at fighting coronavirus)
You aren’t looking at the time dimension. Sweden is doing worse than many although better than some with lockdowns, but that was always the plan wasn’t it? Get the deaths out of the way early. Let’s compare how many deaths each country has six months after the lockdown countries are forced out of their lockdowns by economic reality.
Sweden now has about *40 times* as many new cases per capita per day as Germany. Meanwhile, social distancing has mobility is reduced by 22% in Sweden compared to 32% in Germany. So Sweden is getting devastated right now in case numbers – and a few weeks from now, in deaths – in return for a marginal increase in mobility. Meanwhile Sweden’s economy is plunging – according to some measures, expected to do even worse than Germany’s…
Why would you compare Sweden to Germany and not the UK? Why would you compare it now, when we don’t know what will happen with German infections once their lockdowns are lifted?
The reason is because you are cherrypicking data to fit your conclusion. All of your links have different numbers that you could have chosen to present, but you chose the ones that make your case best.
@LesHapablap
Cherrypicking? Look at the following list — COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants, in Western countries and member countries of European Union — and tell me how anyone could possibly arrive at conclusion that Sweden is anywhere near okay without heavy cherrypicking.
Spain, UK — 600
Italy — 550
France, Sweden — 450
Ireland, Netherlands — 350
USA — 300
Canada, Switzerland — 200
Denmark, Germany — 100
Austria — 75
Romania — 70
Finland — 60
Hungary — 55
Estonia, Slovenia — 50
Czechia, Poland — 30
Croatia, Lithuania — 25
Bulgaria — 20
Latvia — 15
Slovakia — 5
In other words, the only countries you can compare Sweden to, in order to make it seem kinda okay, are Spain, UK, Italy, and France. Where Spain, UK, Italy are the obvious horror examples of handling this situation (and I don’t know much about France).
Prediction: If six months later everyone in Sweden is dead, and coronavirus is happily eliminated in rest of the world, most people on internet will still insist that Swedish strategy was the best.
Less of this, please
Okay. I added some numbers in a comment above. But frankly, I don’t expect that they would change anyone’s mind. I am just posting them as a part of my internet duty.
@Viliam:
> I don’t expect that they would change anyone’s mind.
I don’t know if it “changed my mind”, but I appreciate the numbers much more than your original comment. I’d disagree a little with the interpretation, though.
My instinct is that everything from the top of the list down to “USA” (or possibly “Canada, Switzerland”) is essentially in the same bucket. Given measurement errors, different counting strategies, and random initial conditions, my interpretation would be that Sweden is actually doing quite similarly to the US. If their approach means that they have less damage in subsequent waves, they might even end up doing better in the end.
One could argue that this is still a sign that the Swedish approach doing very poorly compared to some countries, but not, to my eye, that it’s doing significantly worse than all countries with more formal lockdowns. I think the better conclusion (as others have stated here) is that the evidence is still weak and we won’t have a final answer for a year or two. If after this time it turns out that Sweden is still 2x worse for fatalities than similar countries without tremendous economic benefit, then it would be fair to conclude their strategy was a failure.
Okay, so I know this post is about paywalls and how they are bad (which I totally agree with you about, point for point!), but man this throat-clearing opening paragraph is tough for me to hold my tongue on.
What would you say the effects are on your life, when someone who is helping you decides to stop? Does this make your life “better” or “worse”? I would say it plainly makes my life worse. Helping me increases my utility, and not helping me decreases it. This is nearly tautologically true, so there must be something else going on here.
I can see the first counter argument: “When someone stops helping you, it’s not really them who makes your life worse, it’s the outside world/yourself just reverting to it’s natural state”
Which is an unusual take on causality to say the least. I know argumentum ad populum is a fallacy of course, but just in terms of “does this mesh with common folk-morality/intuition”, it should be noted that most people would consider a mother who stops feeding her child (resulting in the child’s death) something akin to a murderer. Or at the very least, they would agree that a mother that stops feeding the child “makes the child worse off”.
While I have seen some very ideologically-seeped people argue along the lines of “no no, it was the child’s own body/nature that killed it”, what I really think is most often going on here is not a debate over causality, but a debate over moral obligations. i.e., “The NYT putting up a paywall might be the cause of you having less knowledge about the world, sure, but they don’t have an obligation to help you anyway, so whatever, it doesn’t count.”
You hint at this position later on in this paragraph:
Implying (perhaps off-handedly, and perhaps unintentionally) that the only acceptable rationale for anger must involve either unfavorable market interactions, externalities, or government force. So do positive moral obligations fit nowhere in your ethical system? Would it be unreasonable for me to be mad about, say, a caregiver deciding not to give an elderly disabled their medication? Or a mother simply deciding not to feed her child? If you agree with any of the positive moral obligations above, then the next question you should be asking is what, if any, positive moral obligations does a business have?
I don’t have interest in discussing them here in specifics, too object-level.
Would it unreasonable for you to be mad about a caregiver quitting? Yes. But if he doesn’t explicitly quit, he has an obligation to do his job
You’re getting into The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Which Scott already went over years ago, so presumably he doesn’t feel the need to repeat himself.
@teageegeepea
Copenhagen Ethics is just another way of saying “our moral obligations depends on our capabilities”, which seems so obviously correct that I cherish every opportunity I have to debate someone who would dare argue to the contrary.
No it’s not. It’s closer to “You break it, you bought it.”
@Guy in TN
This ignores the burdens of the obligations. If you don’t compensate people for that, they have a strong incentive to appear incompetent.
Any solutions to that, which don’t involve positive incentives, are going to involve negative incentives (and you can’t distinguish well between the unable and the unwilling, so some of the former will be punished too).
No, it’s not. If a company fires a thousand workers, Bill Gates has the capability of hiring and paying them a middle class salary for the rest of their lives, but Copenhagen Ethics doesn’t say he’s obligated to do so.
And if by “depends”, you mean “has a factor”, that’s one thing, but if you mean “are determined”, then I disagree that our moral obligations depend on our capabilities.
Several things here.
You’re talking about people who were doing something and then stop. That’s not a new business popping up, that’s an old business disappearing. Your life is worse for the lack of business.
Your examples are monopolies. If parents stop feeding their kids, most other people aren’t in a position to fill the gap. If other people can fill that position, then it’s a neutral; Mom’s not feeding the kid, so Grandma starts doing it.
I assume you’re talking about children who are incapable of feeding themselves. A mother who stops feeding their ten-year-old and instead insists the ten-year-old go to the kitchen and make themselves their own snack is not morally negligent. Even less so when the child is 35 with their own job and living fifty miles away.
@Yug Gnirob
I think it is safe to assume that if the NYT/Washington Post/WSJ/and so on all decide to put up a paywall, there won’t be equal-quality nonpaywalled content that swoops in to replace them. E.g., Netflix has a paywall, and there’s no non-paywall alternative with the same selection.
I don’t think that’s a safe assumption. Assuming the story is worth reading, you’ll get a few people paying for subscriptions, and then going on Reddit and giving everyone the cliffnotes version of the articles, because people love to gossip. Pick a movie on Netflix, and I can find Youtube reviews of it that will show me the actors, the costumes, the writing and the plot. Maybe not “equal quality”, but good enough to not think “man, if only I could afford the New York Times”. Especially true for news, where the draw is supposed to be the facts, not the style.
Scott’s approximately a libertarian, so I suspect the answer is pretty much yes. (I’m definitely a libertarian and my answer is definitely yes.) However:
This can be a question of reliance; if the someone gave you good reason to expect that the help would continue, then stopping is unethical. (Personally I wouldn’t consider merely ‘having consistently given the help for a period of time’ to count by itself as good reason, but others might disagree.)
In creating the child, the mother voluntarily assumed certain obligations to it, which gives the child a claim against her (but not against anyone else; if the mother does stop feeding her child, we can condemn her actions but we are not ethically obligated to feed the child in her stead).
The most dogmatic of individualists might deny even this, saying that there is no contract between the mother and child to specify these obligations, and thus they were never assumed. But in that case, by creating the child in a natural state of hunger without making any provision for its nourishment, the mother has committed a tort against the child (because the child’s current state — dying painfully of hunger — is worse than never having existed); and this again creates a positive obligation for the tortfeasor (the mother) to ‘make whole’ the victim (the child), e.g. by feeding it.
It’s an Ethical System Very Different From Yours, but it All Adds Up To Morality 😉
@ec429
I’m libertarian, and I believe there are positive moral obligations! I just don’t think someone failing to meet these obligations usually justifies violence. (e.g. you may be obligated to call your mom on Mother’s Day but Guy is not justified in beating you up if you do not). Your position is coherent but I don’t think it is a majority position even among libertarians. (Maybe “objectivists” agree with you, but that is a narrower category.)
Accordingly libertarians are free to look down on (or just dislike) a company without hypocrisy even if the company doesn’t violate their rights.
I’m not sure the word “obligation” is applicable unless there’s some mechanism to enforce it (except in the case where you apply it only to yourself; but even then it’s really just a component of your utility function — something you want, rather than something you must).
If the enforcement is mere social opprobrium, then in principle that’s fine, but in practice all the not-libertarians out there seem mighty keen to jump from “this is immoral but doesn’t justify violence” to “let’s have the state ban it anyway”, which is why I take the hard-line position of ‘you do not get to call this a moral obligation’. Calling your mum on Mothering Sunday might be good, but it’s supererogatory in a way that, say, “not stealing” isn’t.
Similarly, I resist the use of the term “right” for anything that doesn’t correspond to a claim against an individual. For instance, saying someone has a “human right to food and shelter” is either meaningless fluff (a claim against society-at-large that doesn’t impose any duty on an individual) or radical communism (any individual with food is obliged to give some to any individual who does not). But by equivocating between these senses, one can create arguments for collectivism which historically have been very effective at convincing people.
You would not equivocate between the two senses of “obligation”. But those who would will happily use you as cover for their aims.
To return to the object level for a moment, if even libertarians are going around saying that businesses have ‘moral obligations’ and should be ‘socially responsible‘, do you not think this makes it politically easier to sell regulation of those businesses For The Public Good? Sure, you know that government regulation crosses the line of “this is actually being backed by violence, which this kind of ‘moral obligation’ doesn’t actually justify”. But Joe Public doesn’t know the difference, especially when you’re being quoted out of context and Joe Public never even hears that bit.
This is probably true. I am well aware that I am an extremist even by libertarian standards. (I find that optima often lie at extrema, even in nonlinear systems.)
If “right” doesn’t mean anything other than “that which one has the right to use violence to enforce”, then that’s … not exactly circular, but still problematic. And if anything with an enforcement mechanism is a right, that’s even more problematic.
I think I specifically believe in avoiding giving businesses moral obligations, as a general case of anti-bundling. That is:
1. Wal-Mart wants to hire people to stock shelves for $15/hour
2. Society wants people to have good health care.
One option is to say “Wal-Mart, if it hires people to stock shelves, should also have an obligation to provide them with good health care”.
Another option is to let Wal-Mart do what it wants, and let society give people health care itself (through government programs or charities).
The first option makes Wal-Mart less likely to want to offer the shelf-stocking deal – if health care is too expensive, it might replace these people with robots, or decide shelves don’t need stocking, or cut their pay in order to afford the health insurance. It also means that whether or not you can get health care is linked to your ability to stock shelves.
The second option has none of these problems.
I think this is a general principle – if you want to provide two things, instead of forcing the people who provide the first thing to take on an unwanted obligation to provide the second thing, let the people who provide the first thing provide it the way they want, and come up with some better idea for how to provide the second thing.
If you really really feel for some reason that Wal-Mart in particular should be on the hook for people’s health care, tax them and use the money to pay for health care yourself, in a way that doesn’t involve Wal-Mart’s decision to hire people or not.
Kelsey gave an amusing illustration of this principle a while back. 🙂 (Also more explicit statement.)
Also can I say I’m kind of really glad to hear you say “anti-bundling”? 🙂 To my mind this, unbundling, is a good general principle. Remember when people were talking about “decoupling” a while back, but only one particular form of it? IMO, decoupling — or as I prfer to say, “orthogonality” — should be applied much more broadly, and this is one example of it.
I’ve never properly gone into this anywhere, but I feel like orthogonality as fundamental principle is way overlooked. Like if we’re talking about liberalism-in-a-roughly-classical-sense, people say the most important thing is freedom, but I say, no, start from a broad principle orthogonality and you can more or less derive a lot of it, freedom becomes largely a special case. Orthogonality and negative feedback loops, those are really the two big principles in my opinion. 🙂
FWIW, I’ve been to the Denver airport at night, and I saw the demon-horse. I thought it was pretty cool; I was actually positively surprised that a government-sponsored project turned out something awesome and unconventional (I mean, contrast this with LAX, which looks like a prison barracks). Maybe I’m just weirdly into glowy-eyed horses, though.
“Make someone else provide the service” is obviously the worst way for the government to provide the service, but it continues for a few reasons.
1. The government bill looks smaller. People hate taxes, and even though they still end up paying the same amount [1] for the service to be provided, it isn’t on their “tax bill” so they don’t get as mad. See also people (usually conservatives) who try to measure the size of government by how much it taxes/spends.
2. Some people really hate other people. It doesn’t matter if making XXX pay for health care is stupid and inefficient. They really really hate XXX, and want XXX to pay for it, and if it hurts XXX’s employees or XXX’s customers, well, good.
[1] Probably more.
@Scott Alexander
Its true that not all forms of taxation are equal, with indirect taxes (such as sales and payroll) having more secondary effects than direct taxation (e.g. property tax). But even direct taxes “bundle” Walmart’s desires to run its business with society-at-large’s desires to have government services, since Walmart could have funneled the money spent on taxation back into its business.
If government provision of healthcare is on the table, there’s just no way around giving business some sort of positive obligation, even if its something as general as “you must pay your property taxes”.
What’s your general argument against bundling? I heard Shishir Mehrotra discuss bundling in various contexts on the Invest Like the Best podcast (episode here).
A short writeup of his topic is available here.
Is your house north, or south? Some words make sense only in comparison to other things. The word “worse” requires two argument. If you try to put “if x > then ” in your computer program, it’s going to throw an error. Clearly, not helping you makes your life worse than if you were helped. But you’re not including that part in your argument, which obfuscates the issue. Apple selling iPhones for $$$ makes my life worse than if they paid me $$$ to take their phone. But that’s a rather ridiculous of the word “worse”. The clear meaning of Scott’s words is that companies can’t take actions that make your life worse than if they didn’t do anything at all, not that companies can make your life worse than some other hypothetical world than you can imagine.
Why do you specify that they stop helping you? You not helping me on Tuesday “harms” me just the same regardless of whether you helped me on Monday (or likely harms me less if you helped me on Monday, since the utility of help is probably sublinear). It’s rather irrational to get more mad at someone who stops helping you than at someone who never helped you. Do you think that “stopping” adds anything to your argument? If so, what?
Your utility after not being helped isn’t lower than before not being helped, so not being helped doesn’t decrease your utility isn’t decreased in any reasonable sense. It’s decreased only with respect to some other other hypothetical scenario.
The child’s existence is due to the mother in the first place.
If they’ve taken on the obligation, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable. Especially if they’ve been hired to be a caregiver. There is the further issue that if the needs of the other person are great (e.g. will die otherwise), and the cost to you is negligible (you’re standing next to the bottle and you just have to hand it over), then not helping seems rather callous. (There’s a season of 24 where a major plot point is blackmail over a woman not giving her abusive husband medicine, which results in his death, and I was a bit frustrated by the characters digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole, when it seems like they could have just said “Go ahead, call the police. What can they do about it?”)
@No One In Particular
“Helping someone” and “harming someone” usually refer to changes in utility (colloquially, “made better off” and “made worse off”). In this sense, it does matter if you helped me on Monday or not.
Let’s say without you helping me, my utility is a 5, but with help, it’s a 10.
With help: Monday 10, Tuesday 5, Net change -5
Without help: Monday 5, Tuesday 5, Net change 0
Only in the first scenario do you make me “worse off”, in the change-of-utility formulation.
Strong disagree. In this context, whether it is rational or not to be mad at someone depends on their capabilities to help. If someone who has the capabilities to help chooses not to, they are more morally culpable than someone who never had the capability to begin with.
I mean, yeah. It’s more than “callous”. Sitting idly while another person dies a preventable death is a moral atrocity. It’s cartoon-villain like, watching a baby on the train tracks, with plenty of time to move it out of the way. Whether the obligation was “freely chosen” plays no role in what the correct behavior is, in this scenario.
IMO everyone has the positive moral obligations to make the world the best place for humanity that they can. And I reserve my right to call-out, shame, and generally “be mad” about anyone who fails to live up to them.
You might want to think that over some. Taken at face value, that means you feel entitled to chew out everyone who so much as took a coffee-break from the task of making the world a better place (unless they absolutely had to take that coffee break.) Measuring everyone against a standard that basically everyone fails to meet is not a good idea. Feeling entitled to call them out for that failure is a recipe for really breathtaking unpopularity.
@johan_larson
I meant this as “it’s not irrational to be mad in certain situations like this”, not as “one must be in a constant state of anger at all situations like this”.
No.
Change means “value after minus value before”. It does not mean “value today minus value at unrelated time”.
Before help: Tuesday 5.
After help: Tuesday 10.
Net change: 5.
Whether an action helps is determined by whether it results in a utility compared to not doing anything. I posted an entire comment explaining this, and explaining that evaluating whether an action helps, based not on whether it results in utility higher than if nothing were done, but whether it results in utility greater than a some other possibility, is incorrect. I explained that “better” takes two arguments, and equivocating as to what the other argument is is fallacious.
And here you are, making the same type of argument yet again. You are condescendingly “explaining” that ““Helping someone” and “harming someone” usually refer to changes in utility”, without discussing what the change is relative to, and then sneaking in “relative to some other day”. What the utility was on another day is completely irrelevant to what the effect of today’s decision is. According to your logic, if you won a million dollars yesterday, then me handing you $100 would be hurting you.
It really doesn’t look like you’re interested in engaging with my points, so I’m not interested in trying to have a discussion with you.
I don’t think this helps your formulation. If all the child’s utility exists because of the mother, then nothing mother could do the child, even if she killed it, could “hurt” the child or make it “worse off” under your criteria.
Or as you might put it, failing to keep it alive on Tuesday has the same outcome as deciding not to get pregnant last year.
Are you assuming that never having existed as a sentient entity is worse than having existed as a baby for some time, than painfully dying? I think there is not a universally shared evaluation.
I agree with the general argument about paywalls – but newspapers made of dead trees have been paywalled by the necessity of purchasing a copy for years BI (Before Internet).
Plus “But if the discussions in the public square have an entry fee, the public square becomes smaller and less diverse.” should really be “If the discussions in the public square have an entry fee, then it is no longer a public square but a fairground attraction.” We are paying to see the bearded lady, the display of 10 things you need to know etc.
I assume this was meant to be “newspapers understandably want to give people limited access”.
The Links articles on this website are usually interesting overall, but they can be among the longest to go through (except for the occasional planet-sized nutshells). When the articles are worth it then it’s fine. But some of them do feel the way you described, like the information could have been better conveyed in a few sentences. I noticed that this has been less true these past months: the Links articles are now much shorter to read, for apparently the same quality of content. I sincerely appreciate the time saved. So thank you Scott for changing the way you write them!
As a counterexample, I love the links posts and would be totally happy to have them twice as long or twice as frequent 🙂
OK, journalist here, who writes relatively often for paywalled sites (enjoy this PAYWALLED review in today’s Times [of London] of The Worlds of JRR Tolkien, by John Garth! It’s really good. The book, not the review.) So: obvious conflict of interest is obvious.
First. I 100% share the frustration of clicking on a link and it turning out to be paywalled, although it bothers me somewhat less than it seems to bother you.
But I don’t really feel it’s hugely different from advertising in general. If I see an advert for a frosty glass of Coke on a hot day, and then I think ‘yes I would really like a glass of Coke’, I would not be frustrated to learn that I have to buy that glass of Coke. I’m not sure that the Twitter headlines and first-two-pars-are-visible thing are necessarily different, except insofar as they are actually successful in making you want the thing they’re selling.
(A fair counterargument: you can just buy a glass of Coke and you don’t need to subscribe to a Coke a day in perpetuity for £6 a week and then find it surprisingly difficult to stop because while you can subscribe on the web you have to unsubscribe by phone.)
Second: Paywalls work. That is, as far as I can tell, those media outlets which have imposed them (in the UK I’m thinking the FT, the Times, New Scientist, the Economist, the New Statesman, the Spectator) seem to make money, where those that don’t (eg BuzzFeed, the Guardian) don’t. This isn’t a solid scientific finding; there are differences in readership etc etc. But the general feeling as I understand it is that paywalls allow some profitability. The media is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely screwed, business-wise, so paywalls are a glimmer of faint hope.
I’m operating on the assumption that we all agree that SOME sort of professional media is necessary for democracies, and that the versions that we have are horribly flawed in a lot of very obvious ways that you can list at least as well as I can, but that they’re better than no media at all. Lots of people may disagree with that, but I think you need to have SOME sort of scrutiny, and the flawed version we have has some value.
If we start excising paywalled media from Google searches etc, then you may tip the balance enough so that paywalled outlets become unprofitable. It won’t, I assume, make non-paywalled ones profitable, it’ll just mean they’re both screwed. And then you end up with no media at all except those which are bankrolled by owners in some way, and hobbyist/citizen journalism. Maybe that’s OK, but I would worry about it.
re clickbait headlines: I’m a little conflicted on this too. I used to work at BuzzFeed (boo hiss, etc; actually as a science writer, I found they had incredibly high standards, but I realise not everyone is a fan of them around here). The BuzzFeed headline ethic was to be maximally transparent and just say as precisely as possible what the story said: “This Guy Had A Playmobil Traffic Cone In His Lung For 40 Years“, etc. It’s the opposite of what I’d call clickbait (curiosity-gap headlines of the “you won’t believe…” kind, where you raise someone’s expectations and then fail to meet them). But we still got accused of “clickbait”: I think the term has gone the way of “troll” and now just means “headline intended to get you to click on it”.
But ALL headlines are intended to get you to click on it! If you write something, presumably you want people to read it, because you think it’s good. You want the headline to fairly represent what the piece says, but you also want it to draw in readers. You have to compress a 1,000-word (or whatever) piece to a 12-word headline, it’s necessarily lossy, and it’s doing two somewhat opposed jobs. I hate writing headlines and now I don’t have to, it’s someone else’s job, and I’m very happy about that. It’s one of those things that non-journalists think is easy, or is deliberately done to infuriate or mislead, but it’s an incredibly hard skill and I don’t usually blame headline-writers for getting it wrong (especially since they’re heavily incentivised to get it wrong in a particular way).
And finally: a point many paywall advocates make is that paywalls aren’t new. It used to be called “buying a newspaper”. The fact that now you can get lots of it for free is new. It’s also completely buggering up the media’s business model. Again, I recognise that many people here won’t think that’s a problem, and that I have a significant COI. But it’s not like there was this golden age where information was free. And people still bought newspapers on the strength of the splash headline, which seems analogous to the “clickbait tweet making you want to read the article but I can’t” thing.
(Callback to the objection about being able to buy things once, not subscribe. You can, I think, buy today’s edition of the London Times on Amazon, and some websites are doing micropayments etc. Maybe this will be fixed.)
Anyway. This is suddenly a massively long comment, for which I apologise. Please! As an olive branch, please come and read my many unpaywalled articles at Unherd, roughly 20% of which link to SSC.
And finally it is of course completely impossible to get around any paywalls in any way whatsoever so you shouldn’t even try because, as mentioned, impossible. Totally.
tl;dr I totally get the frustration with paywalls but I’m really not sure there’s an alternative other than “the media dies out altogether” and I think that’s probably a bad thing on balance
Edited to add a couple of things I thought of and remove “the” from “New Scientist”
The newspaper point is an interesting one, simply because it’s easy to ignore just how much content a traditional newspaper provided to people. I would argue that you could easily consume an entire day just with a newspaper if you truly used every bit of information it provided. Granted, a big part of that would just be doing crosswords/sudoku/other assorted games, but I’m going to guess that most people who read papers don’t go through the obituaries, the letters to the editor, the chess section, daily recipes, tv listings, etc.
All of that content is available to a paywall subscriber, but it doesn’t feel like it has value the way a physical thing does. I wonder the extent to which actually holding something in your hands has a psychological impact on people. Even now, I would much rather buy The Times everyday (probably around £45pm?) than pay the £15 a month to subscribe to their website, even though it is functionally the same thing.
you definitely are more likely to read the whole thing. I used to buy the Guardian at university (shock) and I would dole it out to myself like a meal: you have to read the news, then the comment, then the G2 features, then the sport and crossword as a sort of dessert. Now it’s just all … there. You don’t have that book-like thing of leafing through until it’s complete. It’s a shame and I miss it. (I never buy newspapers now. But I do miss it.)
I was a paperboy for many years, and so I’d know everything on the entire front page. And when I got home I would often go through the whole paper, page-by-page, obviously not reading everything (“obits? who cares!”) but my eyes would glance over every page.
And it was a lot!
You also can’t put your old paywall article in the birdcage and then throw it away once it’s covered in poop.
Or like the paper mentioned in this excerpt from a British poet:
The Sun introduced and then abandoned a paywall. Granted it’s a tabloid rather than a broadsheet, but if that’s sufficiently different to not count, broadsheet newspaper magazine is also different enough not to be lumped together.
The elephant in the room in the UK is the BBC news website, which does give everything away for free.
I agree with your tl;dr though. My preferred option is soft paywalls all round, with a cap of say 5-10 articles a month. This has the vast majority of the benefits of paywalls and some of the benefits of no paywall. You make money from your core audience but it still allows a publisher’s journalism to be read more widely if a story is particularly interesting. It addresses most of the issues Scott raises above because you’re unlikely to follow what is essentially a dead link, so it’s web and search engine friendly. Seems like wins all round to me.
Conflict of interest: I also work in the media.
The elephant in the room in the UK is the BBC news website, which does give everything away for free.
The idea there is that you have already paid the BBC news teams via your television licence, so in a sense you are ‘subscribing’ to the site.
I pay a subscription to my local newspaper which I then read online, because that tells me the news of local interest that I need or want to know. I haven’t bought a print version of any national newspaper in years and I’m not interested in subscribing to any online. If I want the news, I listen to the radio or read the online national TV and radio broadcaster news which, like the BBC, I have paid for via my TV licence. Articles on other news media I will read if it’s free, and won’t if it’s not. I have no interest in subscribing to the NYT or WSJ for the sake of “this one article in a month I might actually want to read”.
Speaking of paywalls and buying things, is “The AI Does Not Hate You” ever coming to Kindle in the US?
Alas it seems unlikely – there isn’t a US publishing deal and it doesn’t look like there will be one. I’m sorry. I hope you find some way of reading it (and I won’t blame you very much if it’s some way that doesn’t involve paying for it, since no one has made it easy for you to pay for it. But don’t tell my publishers that).
The solution may be coming in a form that none of us will like; Microsoft MSN is already firing contract journalists to replace them with automated systems.
Now, I never read the Microsoft news page that irritatingly pops up if I am dumb enough to use Bing or Edge, because I don’t care about pop star/reality TV gossip (sample Top Story: “Leaving hand sanitiser in your car won’t cause it to catch fire”, I am sure you are all relieved to learn). But if they replace their humans with AI, I honestly don’t think there is going to be much of a difference in the kind of content they select, except maybe even trashier.
But chasing clicks with clickbait and subscription models that you can’t easily cancel and paywalled articles is, I think, leading to exactly this race to the bottom of “You won’t believe this [outrage bait/some numpty off a telly show did something stupid]” articles, not quality journalism.
Thanks for a thoughtful comment! I think the perspective of people who actually do need to make money from writing is woefully missing here. I’ve never heard anyone say they like paywalls, but I’ve never heard anyone say they like paying for anything… But I’m not holding my breath for the gift and volunteer economy of Burning Man to go mainstream anytime soon.
People that like clothes are tricked into spending money on clothes, people that like information are tricked into spending money on information. To be fair, clothes-buyers are harder to clickbait. The main bait-and-switch that can be done to them is the garment being low quality/durability, and even that can be evaluated pre-purchase.
You might say Zara/H&M/fast fashion in general *is* that clickbait.
Fast fashion is signalling/Veblen good.
Regarding durability… how do you tell the difference between a garment that will last for years and one that will only last a few months just from examining it in store?
Plus, just because a fabric feels nice in the store doesn’t mean the texture won’t completely change with a few washings.
Admittedly, similar can be said about just about any physical good… What feels well made when examined in a controlled environment where product is cycled out as quickly as possible can prove unfit for actual use in the real world.
There are heuristics for detecting garments that won’t last. I doubt they are infallible – new ways of cutting corners on production/intentionally creating low durability doubtless turn up periodically. But you can avoid a lot of crap, not all of it low priced.
The reddit /r/GoldAndBlack subreddit banned paywalls. One of the things that came up was “soft” paywalls vs. “hard” paywalls. We decided to block both.
I take it you mean links to paywalled articles?
I used to be frustrated with paywalls, but then I realized it was actually really easy to get access through my local library database. That doesn’t solve allthe problems, but it comes close. Notably, interactive visualizations don’t work, and it usually takes 24 hours to appear. (At least for NYT and WaPo, which is most of my paywalled reading, though I think some other publications can take longer.) But I can live with that, and figure if I can’t be bothered to check for the article the next day, it couldn’t be that important. As a bonus, I don’t feel like I’m circumventing the system, and am still indirectly supporting the journalism through the database’s subscription fees.
If anyone here hasn’t looked in to accessing your local library newspaper database, you should try it. It usually only takes your library card number. If your local library system doesn’t have a good program, often there are reciprocity agreements with the town/county next door you can sign up with.
The big question of course, as others have noted above, is how you intend to fund journalism with no paywalls. Adblock has allowed many of us to free ride on the backs of others for a while, but sounds like it’s getting less sustainable over time.
> I apologize to all of you, and I have stopped doing that.
I wonder if this is a thing that goes to the «Mistakes» page, or whether this is a change of opinion of different kind.
> Second, browser or browser-extension designers should figure out some way to automatically get links to display whether they’re paywalled or not. Maybe something like this already exists, but I can’t find it.
I guess the simplest thing in this direction could be you throwing a call to the readers of the blog to start a filter list for uBlock Origin so that paywalled pages are not loaded and repalced with a notification when you click through…
Is clickbait not a Molochian problem at its core? I’ve never encountered anyone that likes it, but journalists/youtubers/marketers/etc. have no choice not to create it because people still go to clickbait far, far more than any other type of content.
I don’t know that this is something that coordinated action can solve, since it would seem you’d need to just fix human psychology to prevent it from proliferating.
Subscriptions enforced by paywalls seem to be the existing escape mechanism.
Build a reputation for delivering on your headlines, then charge for unlimited access.
But you need to get attention first.
For that it helps to have a central position in the legacy networks, then people will debate your Op Ed whether they’ve read it or not.
I have a more fundamental problem in that I currently believe modern journalism doesn’t provide utility at all. It seems to consist mostly of wildly distorting basic facts to fit a narrative. I also believe this is why professional journalism is increasingly outcompeted by bloggers.
My sources of information these days has boiled down to
– bloggers I have grown to trust
– ‘primary’ sources (research articles, public data repositories etc)
As an example, I don’t read Covid-19 news but pretty much know the CDC data by heart at this point.
On the positive side, this fundamental mistrust makes me pretty much immune to clickbait.
Wouldn’t we all?
And that’s just for the trial period. I think I’m currently paying closer to $45/mo. And you can’t even cancel online, you have to literally call them.
I feel like this too, for a different reason: the majority of journalists are evil and trying to hurt me, and I’d be much happier if they all had different, less evil jobs.
You may not like what replaces them.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1268628680797978625 Bari Weiss talks about how the old guard of journalism, who may have been slightly hostile to you, are trying to persevere against a new crop of woke people who came out of modern college and who feel “I feel unsafe” as an absolute veto on dissenting voices.
I’m not sure – isn’t getting rid of journalists *also* an absolute veto on dissenting voices, *as well as* assenting voices?
My non-scientific data of people born after 1990 who are journalists is that they are provided for by parents or a spouse. They can work for no or even negative wages. People willing to work for negative wages can keep a lot of things “alive,” in the sense that zombies are alive. And like zombies, they cannot be killed by traditional methods (such as depriving them of revenue).
*EDIT* To bring this into a bigger picture, on a prior open thread I talked about how the Religious Right isn’t much of a force any more, but people generically on the left shouldn’t be happy. Because from their view, the Irreligious Right has most of the same negative features but is now freed from many of its internal constraints (be moral, etc).
I warned about the game in the other direction, and this is it, exactly. You may feel that the Main Stream Media is out to get you, and you might even be right; but if they are killed, what replaces them may be even worse, because it will still be out to get you, but now freed from many of its internal constraints (tell the actual truth, etc).
It doesn’t matter whether they feel this is an absolute veto; it in fact is not. And it isn’t going to be, except in places like academia and maybe the mainstream media. If it were, Fox News would have been vetoed into oblivion years ago. As would SSC.
Whatever replaces the mainstream media, won’t occupy exactly the same space. Parts of it may be even woker than the 2020 NYT, but those parts will be obviously woke. Other parts, will be founded explicitly in response to that and/or by people “cancelled” for not going along with that, and they will be correspondingly and obviously unwoke.
That seems like strictly an improvement, even if it’s 90% on the undeniably-obviously-woke side.
Yeah. “Without paywalls journalists couldn’t support themselves!” is a feature, not a bug.
Sorry but I feel like you describe 90% of English newspaper articles even before the paywalls.
I remember stopping reading the Gurdian for that.
Most articles had this structure: “Header, Subheader, Paragraph1(rephrasing the subheader), Paragraph2(rephrasing the subheader again), Paragraph3(Some actual information, oftened married to the header and subheader with questionable logic), Paragraph4(rephrasing the subheader), Paragraph5(In conclusion: the Subheader)
Score one for the home team!!! /Claps
I agree with everything you’ve said above.
As a personal rule I refuse to stay on a site with a paywall. I hate the GDPR wrappers too and cloud flare is a pox (stop de-anonymizing everyone re-captcha we know what you’re doing and we hate you) I also no longer take part in the effort to train ML algos!!! I also hate sticky headers for others who feel the same here are some tools
ctrl+a ctrl+c == article on your scratch pad. this works for NYT (at time of posting)
https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
As to cloudflare and re-captcha being in league with the devil (they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19155643 and https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side)
I don’t know what to do about this it’s kicked me off TOR as cloudflare has too deep of a penetration these days to avoid (makes web un-browsable now). Please help me guys my kung-fu is weak QQ QQ
But seriously ya’ll need killsticky I won’t leave duckduckgo without it now
https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
If anyone can give me a robust solution to make TOR rout around re-captcha I will be forever in your debt.
/bows
There’s also a browser extension that does this: AlwaysKillSticky (kills stickies automatically, keeps killing stickies that pop up even after the page is loaded, gets `position:sticky` as well as `position:fixed` elements, can work in either whitelist or blacklist mode, plus some other neat stuff.).
I think you’re leaving the elephant in the room not addressed.
If you don’t like paywalls – all your suggestions in the end aim at passively defeating paywalls – how will journalists make money?
Please do not say “advertisement”. One – it has been tried and it worked badly. Two – advertisers then have undue influence on what the paper is allowed to print.
Without addressing this, trying to defeat paywalls is uncharacteristically naive of you. Reminds me of pirating software in 1990s under the banner of freedom and such.
Best, Alex
Personally, I would gladly pay a subscription service for news, if I got some good value in exchange. I don’t want to see ads, or clickbait, or ads disguised as news, or random opinion statements from celebrities. I also don’t want to see bare-bones reports to the extent of “person X tweeted Y” (I could read the tweets myself, if I wanted to). I want to see in-depth investigative analysis of what’s going on with Y.
Currently, AFAIK exactly zero mainstream news sources provide such a service, so I’m not willing to pay for them.
IMO, this is much more a statement about “mainstream” than it is about “news”. The tension can be relieved by either relaxing the former requirement and looking for more niche publications, or the latter and accepting it’s a matter of entertainment. Denying the resolution and dictating what the mainstream preference should be is pretty much distilled CW.
CW certainly wasn’t my intention; in my experience, all major news sources act this way, regardless of bias. When I say “mainstream”, I mean publications like the New York Times by contrast with niche-interest sites such as Bounding into Comics or even this very site — SSC.
Also, I’m not denying anyone anything; all I’m saying is that the current major news sources provide very poor value for the money in exchange for their paywalls. I am not opposed to the very concept of money, or anything like that; I’d just prefer to get more for what they are asking me to pay. You could certainly disagree with me, but I don’t think this is a particularly politically charged viewpoint.
I wasn’t accusing your comment of being culture-warry in a specific way, I was making the point that attempting to push the mainstream to better reflect one’s personal preferences is what culture war is.
Contrast this with the claim “the Avengers movies provide very poor value for the money, I’d prefer to get more for what they are asking me to pay” spoken by an aficionado of French independent cinema.
If you want better value for money, go buy a different product. If you want to be part of the mainstream, then do that. Wanting the mainstream to be something different is a different beast altogether.
I’m not telling newspapers not to use paywalls, and I’m very specifically not telling people to subvert paywalls (even though half the commenters here seem to think I just don’t know how to do this). Newspapers have the right to try to make money, and the rest of us have the right to not give newspapers that money because we don’t want to. I’m talking about ways that people who don’t want to use newspapers can avoid having those newspapers and their paywalls inconvenience themselves and others.
TV news lived off ads for decades.
I realize the point of the essay is about paywalls and not about the need for newspapers to pay journalists, but I wanted to put a plug in for the traditional newspapers, particularly the WSJ. As near as I can tell, the quantity and quality of information in one location far surpasses any other single information source. Not only is the level of the national and international news coverage superior but there are daily articles on personal healthcare, investing, science, book reviews, travel, etc. along with routine articles on art, architecture, theater etc. I’m not as familiar with NYT or Washington Post, but I assume they provide a similar high quality product.
I find almost all other major news sources (network news, CNN, NPR, Fox etc.) mostly soundbites and sensationalism, severely lacking in comparison to the WSJ or NYT, sometimes driving me to the point of despair when I consider that the vast majority of Americans, to the extent they get any news, use these popular sources.
But there is high cost of providing worthwhile information. I don’t know how many journalists the WSJ employees, but they obviously have many journalists dedicated to specific topics like foreign countries, business, healthcare, entertainment, the arts, etc. So while I get the point about paywalls, I just wanted to point out that it costs a lot to dig into the details and that something will be lost when everybody decides to stop paying for newspapers, paper or digital.
I like the idea of being careful with your audience’s resources such as time and attention.
I regularly feel overwhelmed by all the things I want to do and read, or worse, feel like I should do and read. It’s nice when someone is going out of their way to not waste two minutes of my time with clickbait (and in total avoiding thousands of people spending their time unwisely).
I also enjoy the Attention Conservation notices on Three-Toed Sloth, which is just a one line summary at the top of the post stating clearly why you should not read this post.
I’m really sick of most aspects of modern journalism, most of which is downstream of the internet and cost-cutting.
Yeah there’s the clickbait and the paywalls and the partisanship and the self-absorption and sanctimony. (A lot of the reason this has gotten worse is because young journalists all hang out on twitter and it makes them clique-y and constantly competing to outwoke each other)
The amount of filler, fnords, framing decisions, critical jargon, and inability to ask even basic truth-seeking follow up questions make 95% of modern articles (which are now 95% of google results on a topic) worse than useless.
Wish there were more number driven journalism like fivethirtyeight on other topics, and that science journalism was only slightly dumbing down abstracts a la neuroscience news and that these results would show up on google when you search a topic.
Let’s see. The businesses that ring my phone regularly, whether or not I’m asleep. Sometimes if I answer, they connect a tape which tells me about something they imagine I might want to buy. Frequently they fill my answering machine with their advertisements. a really pro-business person would justify this because they might someday inform me about something I haven’t heard about before, that I might want to purchase.
Of course this falls under externalities, except to the business apologist who values being told about random products so much that they presumably seek out advertisements to fill their otherwise idle minutes, between processing spam and praising the businesses which generate it.
But somehow, those externalities don’t seem to count. My time is not valuable, to most business apologists, unless I’m being paid for it. Certainly my sleep isn’t valuable, or my ability to receive and be interrupted by important calls, none of which involve trying to sell me something.
Net result – I read right past your use of the word “externalities”, and had composed the first paragraph of this article before I even noticed that you had technically covered this case.
I’m posting anyway, because there’s a point in here about general distrust of businesses and their leaders, and willingness to stick things to them, by stealing their content, not to mention blocking their ads, etc. etc.
This is the context in which everyone I know passes around tips for bypassing paywalls, blocking ads in spite of attempts to detect ad blockers, etc. etc. – except perhaps those so well off that they don’t notice the cost of buying subscriptions to anything they’re interested in.
And that’s even before I get to the various other supposedly unintended results of DRM, which farther increase my approval of anyone who bypasses it, regardless of that being considered “theft”, as well as my disapproval and avoidance of any business which uses it.
And yes, paywalls register with me as fitting in the general category of DRM.
I agree in principle that people own their content, and can sit on it like a dragon with its horde, refusing to disclose it. I’m a lot less happy when someone else created that content (hello, academic journals) and may have had to pay the journal to get it published at all. But if your content is paywalled, then expect me to treat it as non-existent. The argument you published doesn’t prove anything to me – all I saw was a headline, and it was probably click bait, not representative of the actual content.
To point #5) I have noticed on Marginal Revolution, Tyler usually puts a “NYT” or “WSJ” at the end of the link if it goes to those paywalled sources, likely with these frustrations in mind. Knowing I get 3 or 5 NYT articles per month, I make sure I only click on the ones that deeply interest me. It’s a weird equilibrium.
Wondering if addiction more broadly is actually the most serious challenge / counter-argument to capitalism that exists. How pervasive is this? Drugs are obviously addictive, but how about news / social media / certain types of foods, etc? It seems like the logical endpoint of the perfect capitalist product is addiction.
TBC, I probably still take capitalism over all other forms of economic organization, but this seems like a real thing.
Scott the journalism industry would simply cease to exist if your preferences were to be implemented, and you seem to care not one iota that this is the case. You’ve written worse things than this but you’ve never written something so thoughtless.
Would it really ? The Open Source industry exists, and they’re not paywalling their source code…
Look, it’s all a mess and journalism might not survive either way. But online advertising has an inherent problem: space online is effectively infinite, which means that you’re selling something that has essentially limitless supply. Even if we measure in terms of eyeballs the ratio between what you can charge and what you need to earn from advertising on a purely advertising model is perilous. Creating a product and selling it for more than it cost you to make it is a business plan; creating a product and giving it away for free is a suicide pact.
If they’re not getting paid, they’re doing it because they’re highly motivated to do it.
Do you want your news from 5G viridiots, antivax/chemtrailers and religious fundamentalists?
I don’t.
The NYT and other mainstream outlets are just as sloppy and dishonest as all of these people, only their pet causes are more popular so they get away with it.
As Matt M says, this is basically what we’ve got now, plus or minus your favorite cause. That said, not all of Open Source is crypto-mining computer viruses, either — in fact, almost none of it is ! — so IMO you need to present more evidence for your claim.
That’s different because you write code once and it works forever. But news needs to be created at a relatively constant rate and quality, day in and day out. It’s much much harder to find volunteers to do that.
As someone who’s written Open Source code and professionally works with it … it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Open Source code is to a product what journalism is to a quality product. It’s generally either stuff paid for by other people, or people navel gazing and impressing themselves with their own brilliance.
As someone who’s worked with commercial code, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be either. You can see some examples of horrible commercial code here
I can’t help but think that microtransactions are the answer. I would pay 1/4 or 1/2 or 1 cent to read an article that has been vetted by a blog I enjoy, but I’m not likely to sign up for $x/month for a newspaper I don’t even know if I’ll revisit. 100,000 hits = $500-1,000? Fair? I don’t know, but maybe enough to buoy up the sagging advertisement revenue.
No one has solved the collective action problem of a hyperefficient payment clearinghouse in the 25 or more years since this idea has been around.
But we do have sort of a hyperefficient payment clearinghouse now.
So now we got blogs and social networks with micromonetization and instant messengers with built-in payments. It’s really micro: even Yudkowsky earned just $4. But it’s out there.
Notice that I didn’t say at any point that newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to have paywalls, or that people should “illegally” subvert those paywalls. I just talked about ways to prevent people who don’t want to read paywalled content from having that content inconvenience them.
If newspapers are so dependent on unwilling customers that eg letting people know which sources are or aren’t paywalled means people would never click on a paywalled one, or that letting people get the Google results they want instead of wading through a bunch of paywalled things to find something they can read means nobody would ever read a newspaper, then it sounds like nobody actually likes or wants to read newspapers and nobody would miss them. This would surprise me. I think some people subscribe to newspapers because they actually like them and consider them worth the money, and that’s fine, and those people should keep doing that.
I think you’re seeing a lot of criticism/confusion in the comments here because it looks like you’re equivocating between two popular but distinct positions that are generally held to be diametrically opposed, in service to an unclear thesis.
Following a link and slamming into a paywall is obnoxious – pretty much everyone online has had this experience. Clickbait is aggravating to experience at best and is actively destructive to the commons at worst – again, pretty accepted. But it’s generally held that clickbait is most strongly incentivized by advertising models that lack paywalls; multiple people have already mentioned that the Vice article referenced is an excellent example. If you don’t want bait, then therefore you want paywalls.
The people who would disagree with that are folks that like to solicit a wide variety of high-grade sources and regularly follow links, but aren’t already subscribed to the largest publications. (Paywalls can be remarkably frictionless with a modern browser, depending on your security settings.) This is… not a large audience; and many in this group know the workarounds anyway. The suggestion of marking paywall links might be good etiquette for a site that collects such links, but asking the publishers themselves to cater to this small audience of non-payers is a non-starter. (And automating such efforts is non-trivial.)
So it’s not clear what you’re asking for. And people making guesses are presumably mostly getting it wrong.
Most paywalls use some clickbait techniques anyway. They show you the first two paragraphs, or show the text briefly and then immediately hide it, and they usually show the text to Google but not to you.
They kinda have to, otherwise how would they compete against other paywalls? High quality of writing can be attractive to existing readers, but to survive you need to get the new ones before your competition gets them. Then you take advice from Moloch.
At the end of the day, there are too many people who would like to make their living by writing online articles, but only a limited budget they compete for. Internet made this competition more intense, by reducing the costs of publishing, allowing more people to enter the ring.
Paywalls will not solve the problem of clickbait, because there is simply not enough money to make all paywalls profitable.
First: paywalls being an imperfect solution is already enough to render an argument disincentivizing them while being opposed to clickbait incoherent at the margin. I believe that to be a reconcilable position, but doing so requires more work than is obviously present here.
Second: almost this entire discussion has been exclusively from the perspective of those outside the paywalls. There is a content strategy that, while perhaps not quite yet at an equilibrium, comes about as a result of appealing to the currently paying customers as well as the hypothetical future ones. You can’t discount the former and still have an accurate model of the industry.
Third: this part of the argument really needs to leave the armchair and start pulling numbers; a Malthusian approximation isn’t good enough. The WSJ, NYT, and WaPo have all managed to turn profits in the past few years despite the collapse of the online advertising market. BuzzFeed and Vice have not. Predictions of a race to the bottom have been conclusively falsified in certain sectors of the media – distinguishing annoyances may be a feature, not a bug.
Intellectual property from two conflicting directions.
1. Your first argument validates electronic piracy, and it should, because it helps clarify the market signal
Deals go both ways. A standard pro-customer argument could be : customers can either make your business thrive (by buying products you make) or not contribute at all (by not buying your products, which you then don’t get to sell). They can’t really make your life worse, unless they destroy your products or property. But in general, if you’re angry at a customer, those are materially-provable conditions. Otherwise, they’re just helping you less than you wish they did, not hurting you.
So then consider that A. I have no real desire to see [movie X] or to listen to [music Y] at any meaningful profit-generating price. I might try if the only cost was my time and attention. But I wouldn’t actually buy it. If I obtain a pirated copy, the company has not incurred any material loss. The only thing they have lost is the purchase that they wished I would make – but this loss is entirely imaginary. You can’t take my money just because you think I should like your product more than I do.
Imagine that this piracy is discovered, and given a choice “pay up, or delete the files with no ability to recover them” I opt for the latter. Now the company still has none of my money and has not recouped anything material. What good is that for anyone?
One could argue that if I pirate music, and subsequently have to “return” it, but can then tell my friends about the music, then I am helping the market to be more efficient. If I pirate music that sucks, then that music should die. If I pirate music that others find interesting, then that music should get signal-boosted. Piracy effectively removes noise from the channel.
2. These websites are trying to sell (and to protect) ideas
An idea exists in the mind. This means it is permanent. Once the idea has been appreciated in full, it cannot be removed or revoked. This also means it is inducible. Even the components of an idea can be assembled by the receiving brain into the idea itself, without the full revelation of the idea (probably more true of better ideas than worse ones).
So how does one sell an idea? You can’t let the customer try the idea out, neither in full nor in part – once they know the idea, the only incentive to pay you is their own good will. Instead, you have to emotionally suggest that the idea you are dangling is worth the customer’s attention. Once the customer has paid, then you can give them the idea, and they have to decide whether it was worth it. It’s a little like blackjack.
And if you pay for the article and then disseminate its ideas to people who would otherwise have paid for the article, that’s like telling other blackjack players what the top card of the deck is. It’s not simply cheating – it’s altering the fundamental character of the game. Blackjack tables aren’t supposed to be ATM machines, they’re designed to be ways to gamble. The fun is in the risk.
And the house has to win most of the time if the lights are to stay on – presumably there are other games just as fun as blackjack that the casino will never host because the house mostly loses.
This is always the argument of the pirate, but it’s an empty one – it is based on the faith that you really would not have paid any money for the product under any circumstances. But how could you possibly know that when the possibility of getting it for free was so central to your mind? You have absolutely every reason to want to believe that you would not have paid for it if you could not have gotten it for free. It’s motivated reasoning at its most extreme: all you have to do is assert the utterly non-falsifiable claim that you wouldn’t have paid money for it no matter what, and you absolve yourself of any moral culpability. This is what the French existentialists called bad faith, and to be frank, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that you are so sure that you never would have paid for it. Quite the opposite.
Regardless of personality, the widespread existence and popularity of newspapers in the 20th century says that journalism is undoubtably valued in aggregate
And don’t forget the people who say they are immune to advertising!
Solvitur ambulando, friend. I have never paid for a New Yorker article. But I have read the New Yorker in the dentist’s waiting room. So there definitely exists a class of thing which a priori I would enjoy but would not pay for, and not even in bad faith.
Moreover, rationalization only works to the degree that its claim corresponds to an actual behavior. It’s incoherent to say “That’s rationalization because you’re lying.” Those are different things.
The existence of a class not establish that its members can be reliably identified.
The behavior is piracy.
Then this comes down to the question : who knows better what the consumer actually wants, the consumer or the seller?
@rahien.din
No, it doesn’t. It’s not legitimate, when responding to a claim that someone has an imperfect ability to evaluate something, to simply point to someone with even less of an ability. That’s just changing the subject.
Of course it does.
The consumer makes the claim “I wouldn’t pay for that.” The seller makes the claim “Yes you would.” One of the two is right.
Given the existence of two classes (things which the consumer would never pay for, and things which they would pay for if not for piracy), the disputes is over the correct classification of the item.
But the true classification exists only within the consumer’s mind. Detecting the correct class of item is thus identical to knowing the consumer’s mind.
So we must ask the question : who knows better what the consumer actually wants, the consumer or the seller?
Or, to take your point : if we cannot readily identify the correct class of object, we have to default to the consumer’s point of view. It’s their mind and their money, and they have first rights to both.
I have positive proof that I would never under any circumstances pay for unaccessible content, and, fittingly, it’s paywalled newspaper articles.
I grew up with books and records and movies on physical media, where you had to incur some cost to obtain them, whether legally or not. Would I continue paying for them if no other option surfaced in the meantime? Likely yes. (Though mostly I would continue not paying for most of them, because poverty.) But online articles, streaming services, computer programs, mobile apps, everything that only became an option when I was already mostly formed human being? I had a chance to make a conscious choice, the choice was to reject paying for them under any circumstances, and I’ve stuck to it for decades now.
Would I reconsider if some totalitarian simply forbid exchanging any information free of charge to protect professional content makers? Perhaps, but I don’t think “ha, you say you wouldn’t, but you in fact would under extreme oppressive coercion” is a meaningful gotcha. In fact I distinctly recall people entertaining such scenarios in early internet days. They did not come to pass, and it seems that they’re just not realistic in a minimally free society on a current technological level.
I pirate prolifically and I can say with certainty that 95% of what I pirate I would never pay for. Because when it comes to media, there are basically an infinity of substitutes and at this point piracy is so ingrained in my behavior that paying for something like that is almost out of the question.
But I don’t think this is a moral justification for what I do. Why should it matter whether I ‘would have’ paid for something in a counterfactual world? I am deriving value from something while violating the social contract that says I should pay for it. Is that immoral? I don’t know, I guess. But I’m mostly selfish and unprincipled so, meh.
This argument supports not feeling guilty about engaging in piracy. But as Freddie deBoer says, it suffers from the possibility of motivated reasoning. I would not go as far as them, but certainly your feeling that you would not pay for something is suspect, and likely false on the margins. Furthermore, your private justification for piracy is different from the issue of whether we, as a society, should tolerate it. Just because you know you wouldn’t have paid for it, doesn’t mean that society isn’t justified in punishing you for it, as allowing “I wouldn’t have paid for it” as a defense would be fatal to enforcing copyright.
I do have another argument against copyright, in that ex post facto extension of copyright term is blatant rent seeking, and it’s hypocritical for those engaging in what is basically theft to accuse others of theft. Morally, I don’t think there is any problem with pirating anything that would be in the public domain but for ex post facto copyright extension, and I think an argument can be made for pirating material owned by a company that owns material covered by ex post factor extension and that lobbied for such extension.
Sesame Street demonstrates that clickbait journalism is older than the Internet.
I think there’s something wrong with this sentence, looks like two different versions got written and smushed together in an edit. Either that or this is a new version of the the game in which case I see what you did there.
This is perhaps the first time I really disagree with main point of Scott´s article. Paywalls are good.
Clickbait is caused by a hunt for advertising revenue. Paywalled sites can make implicit contract with readers that they will stay away from low effort clickbait, thus foregoing some advertising revenue, in exchange for, you know, subscription money. If you do not have subscribers, there is no incentive to avoid clickbait.
By a coincidence I just got into a little discussion on social media with an editor of national publication (in a country with 10 million people it is not so unusual situation), after expressing unhappiness with some of their content, which caused quite a stir and I am sure a lot of clicks (it is a very CW issue). Only reason I am paid attention to is because I am a paying customer and their revenue is not based on clickbait.
Ditto. I agree with everything Scott says about clickbait being a negative-sum game and I’ve made a bunch of those complaints myself, but it’s weird to see him blend clickbait with paywalls when my impression has been that paywalled articles are some of the least likely to use clickbait titles. I can imagine a world where paywalls and clickbait go hand in hand, but as far as I can tell that isn’t this world. Though I admit this is only my impression rather than the results of any careful analysis, so I wouldn’t be shocked if you could pull up some study showing positive correlation between clickbaitiness and paywalls.
I feel like there’s thing going on with some rationalists where they feel like a) consuming media is bad – which is true at the margin, sure, but it sometimes leads to a full Galaxy brain conclusion: b) the media is bad.
It is frustrating to me that the same people who exalt Chesteron’s fence are so willing to throw out a professional media, which is a well-established part of a free democratic society.
A friend recently decided that he wanted to be more well-informed, and so he subscribed to the top five or six newspapers, and never has to think about paywalls (or, at least, doesn’t have to think about it beyond logging in). As a professional, this is a trivial expense for him, tho it seems like it’s a little different for you (if you decide to be a MR, you’re not just making this decision for yourself, but also for your readers).
I am confused about the ‘principle of the matter’ here, and my crux seems to be whether newspapers are entertainment or ‘the discourse’, in the non-pejorative sense that also includes science. Like, in the world that’s ideal for spreading knowledge, scientific papers are provided for free, and most people have access to most books through libraries (or electronic copies through online libraries), and so the best ideas can spread rapidly.
But, like, I don’t care that people have access to music; there, it seems fine for artists to hold their products ransom, and for the rewards they receive to be proportional to the number of people who care about their stuff enough to exchange cash for it. (Similarly television shows, and fiction novels, and so on.)
And I’m confused about how much my thoughts here are biased by being ‘online-first’ in some meaningful way? If the only way to transfer things was saying them or writing them by hand, I would be way more sympathetic to the position of “if you want knowledge from someone else, you have to pay them for the labor of providing it.” But we almost live in a public goods paradise, where people provide things for free that cause other people to make things that they then provide for free. This doesn’t actually apply to things like science (where people pay a lot to acquire the specific things that they write up, that I’m then asking them to broadcast for free), but nevertheless I think the point holds (for almost any study, the expense of running that study pales in comparison to the expense of all the science that came before them).
Also, when you think of ‘the discourse’ as being the partisan squabble instead of people trying to build up humanity’s knowledge, paywalls have the insidious effect that you are preaching to the choir, whereas people who could criticize you are discouraged for doing so; then likely don’t want to subscribe in the first place, and even if they responded, their regular audience likely wouldn’t have seen the original article.
It’s not enough to be personally informed. You also want to have informed debates with other people, which means they need the same information you have. And that’s unaffordable, or else runs into awkward free rider problems.
Not everyone has an intelligent opinion worth sharing. Paywalls act as a good filter. If an individual does not have the basic computer knowledge to bypass these paywalls, they probably do not have the general intelligence to meaningfully contribute to internet discussions.
This is a take on “Learn to Code!” that I don’t think I have seen before, but I don’t think it is an improvement over the original. Learn to Not Talk like an Evil Robot, please.
There are tons of intelligent people who don’t know how to bypass paywalls, either because their talents are in a field like the humanities rather than STEM, or else because they are old and grew up without tech so it comes a bit slower to them. If you miss out on their opinions, it’s your loss.
The WSJ really is a great newspaper, probably the best in the world. You can get an online access deal for $1 for two months, which is a great deal. With online access you can get a very nicely done PDF of the whole paper and/or you can use their very good reader software. The WSJ really is a class act in the newspaper world and I bet that if you tried the $1 subscription for two months you would be hooked.
As for the Holman Jenkins column, he wasn’t saying that lockdowns don’t prevent COVID-19; he was saying that they are unsustainable from an economic and social perspective. And once a society makes the decision to begin to ease their lockdown even though a large fraction of their population has never been infected (and without a vaccine or cure on hand), that society is, in effect, adopting the Swedish policy of a very light lockdown.
Here’s an excerpt from the Jenkins’ column that gets to the meat of his point:
“There are as many experiments happening as there are countries, each conditioned by its own demographic, cultural and geographical idiosyncrasies in ways that will make sorting out the results difficult even when the data are in.
These experiments are in too early a stage for some of the absurd pronouncements being made. Take the U.S.-Sweden comparison. The U.S. shutdowns have been patchy: Lots of people and places already have been living under restrictions more Sweden-like than New York City-like. Now, with the majority of their publics still uninfected, countries everywhere are reopening—i.e., becoming Swedish. The only conclusion available now is that the Swedes were right: The lockdowns were not sustainable.
We have paid a huge price for our media being unable to frame the virus as a problem with a time dimension and one necessitating trade-offs. Now come the Ministry of Truth-style flip-flops from major press outlets, announcing in headlines that the virus might be here permanently and we might have to adopt cost-benefit learning to live with it.
Virologists and competent commentators could have told us that in January, and did.”
I find it hugely annoying when a provider of any kind offers me a ridiculously low price with a timeout followed by a ridiculously high price in the steady state. Do they really think I’m that stupid?
I took that WSJ offer intending to cancel, got hooked, haven’t canceled.
n=1.
You said, “Some people critique capitalism by saying it creates new preferences that people have to spend money to satisfy. I haven’t noticed this being true in general – I only buy shoes when I need shoes, and I only buy Coke when I want Coke. But it seems absolutely on the mark regarding paywalled journalism.”
I would suggest that this is not because it is more true for journalism on average, but because you are relatively unusual in not having this be true for other things like shoes or coke. See:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
Shoes often are bought not because of intrinsic value, but fear of severe effects on one’s social standings for not having suitably expensive ones.
1. If we want to have useful things, in the end we have to pay for them. Otherwise there will be no supply. You, Scott, are saying you want to pay for them by having your time and attention wasted by advertisements. The Wall Street Journal, ToL, NYT, WaPo, etc., have decided that they do not wish to waste their readers’ time in this way. (To the same degree as other “news sites” do, anyway.)
2. A little bit of victim-blaming: use your time better. It’s all you have.
Over time I have learned to avoid clickbaity headlines, unless the byline is that of a writer I trust. (Just as I avoid books that bill themselves as “the most exciting thriller you will read this year” and similar: I translate that to “badly written, worse edited, and cluelessly marketed! Avoid this book!”.)
A headline “Why ${thing}” is clickbait, and the answer is not worth your time under any circumstances. If despite the headline the information is in fact valuable, future you will have picked it up from other sources in due time. Dopamine addiction is a terrible thing all by itself; try to avoid the worst secondary diseases. Your attention is your most precious resource.
3. You are right that newspapers could do better. One of my locals, the NZ Herald, clearly marks paywalled content with a yellow-background “premium” tag. This seems like a useful convention.
4. Charlie Stross’s series of essays, Common Misconceptions about Publishing, is tangentially relevant here. Contrary to popular belief, physical printing and distribution costs are minor for most publications. The big costs are those of intellectual creation and marketing.
Yes that’s true re:1 but as long as there are so many free versions of the news it’s a fundamentally broken model and trying to keep it afloat based on irritation and vague sorts opinion pieces rather than genuinely paying for authoritative news is never going to fund journalism. It will just turn all our news sources into Vice.
The problem that no one in print media will acknowledge is that there should be maybe 3-5 companies that provide general news coverage (ie cover all major stories on either their website or their cable channel). Once you cut all the dead weight of the excess reporters merely calling press offices to verify or typesetter, ad depts, sales etc for all the various city papers I think you’d find plenty of money was available for real investigative reporting.
It’s just nuts there is a NYT a Chicago tribute (maybe still sun times) an LA whatever etc etc in addition to all the cable companies who send their own reporters to all these events and do the *same* original reporting on them. WTF?!?!? I mean even the WH press club has 49 seats and sometimes there are standers. The president might answer 3 or maybe 6 questions so what investigative purpose is served by documenting what he said 49 times.
To put the point a different way suppose that CNN, MSNBC and NBC just did all the basic original reporting (Fox would probably be better off striking a deal to just buy most content from CNN since their value add is opinion but maybe them too) which they put on TV and hired away the better writers from the print publications to write it up online. If they we’re the only three national coverage news orgs even with just the extra ad money from online print they could dump tons more into true novel investigative reporting but once you got down to a handful of true news agencies people would buy subscriptions to at least 1 if not several.
Like any other industry journalism needs to adapt to new competitive realities and the sooner we pair down the number of organizations doing complete coverage the better.
There’s one major issue with Paywalls that no one here has identified (in the comments I’ve read so far): The “Other Guys” never paywall.
Freedom.Eagle on Facebook? Free.
Flat Earther website? Free.
Obama is a Kenyan conspiracy? 2 movies 1 Screen? Infowars? r/TheDonald?
So I’m going through Reddit or Facebook or Twitter and an increasing number of the reputable / reasonable sites – that we would most likely want to be the most commonly viewed baseline – block their content behind paywalls and the shrillest loudest craziest maniacs don’t?
As Tyler Cowen would say – Solve for the equilibrium.
They don’t have the brand recognition to get away with paywalls. Ben Shapiro’s movie is behind a paywall.
Plus who’s gonna trust a conspiracy theorist who tells their audience they can trust credit cards and online charges? No one that’s who.
“I think I would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist, compared to the world where they exist but their articles are paywalled.”
In all my years of reading SSC I have never disagreed more strongly with a statement written here. Just curious, Scott, are you donating to Pro Publica (or similar news sources)? Because without paywalls (and in a world of ad-blockers) that’s your only hope of decent news.
I read a LOT of news online, and have subscribed to multiple newspapers at a time. I have no problem with paywalls (soft or hard). I think the amount of time/frustration is very much exaggerated here. Maybe just avoid clickbait?
Oh, and the Wall Street Journal (non-editorial) was the only news source (online, print, TV, etc.) that is trusted by both liberals and conservatives in a recent poll.
You think Scott would not, in fact, prefer a world without newspapers to a world with paywalls?
Huh, I really thought that this was going to apply the principle beyond internet articles to a general case, like how programming language popularity is inverse to quality because of paywalls, and copyright nonsense that prevents people from learning things by digitally tinkering, and such.
how programming language popularity is inverse to quality
Wait, what?
It’s true. LOLCode is the highest-quality language there is 🙂
Basically, people did create more rigorous languages than the likes of PHP and Javascript back in the day, but they were locked up behind licensing requirements. So everyone learned how to code in very much less rigorous free programming languages, instead, leading to those languages becoming standard, and leaving behind swaths of shoddy legacy code.
A licensing requirement is itself a factor in the quality of a programming language. One of the major purposes that a programming language serves is there being a standard means of turning code into machine language. Creating a bunch of proprietary silos acts against that goal.
A lot of those “more rigorous” languages might only look more rigorous because, a lot less people (which means a lot less idiots), did common anti-patterns to them.
The project I’m in uses one of those “paywalled” languages, and belive me, there is a lot of stuff there, that might have looked like a good idea in the 90ties, but ain’t.
When I examine my feelings about paywalls, in some sense they feel like fraud.
Let me explain: When I see a hyperlink, my usual expectation is that it leads to an article, that is relevant to the link text. Sometimes it does, and that is what I expected. But sometimes it only leads to first two paragraphs and an offer to buy the article. But that is not what the link suggested, so I feel cheated.
The false advertising aspect is that you implicitly promised me “an article about X”, but instead you provided me “the first two paragraphs, and an option to buy an article about X”. Those are definitely not the same thing! But the fact that I expected the former is the only reason why I clicked on the link. So you intentionally deceived me, in order to make a profit… not exactly from me, but on average. Actually, if the paywalled page also displays a third-party ad, you already made a tiny profit from me, even if I refused to buy anything.
Imagine if we instead lived in a world where, somehow, all links to paywalled articles contain “[PAYWALLED]” in their texts.
In that case, the paywalls would be much less irritating, because I would simply never click on such link. I would be told truthfully what the link leads to, and I would not click it because I am not interested, duh. Unless, hypothetically, the title would be so interesting to me that I would click on the link already decided that I am going to subscribe.
As a journalist, how would you feel about a hypothetical law saying that links to all paywalled articles have to contain “[PAYWALLED]” in their text? (With a possible exception for two articles behind the same paywall linking each other.) Or perhaps a technical solution when there is a new protocol “HTTPP” for all paywalled pages, so you don’t have to add anything to the link text, because it will be obvious from the URL, and the web browsers will display such links using a different color and different mouse cursor?
If this sounds bad to you, then you kinda admit that deception is an important ingredient in your business, don’t you?
I like this. I’d probably want to enhance it to distinguish the type of cost:
– (a) requires payment in wasted time and computer cycles, in the form of ads
– (b) requires a subscription to a large set of things, including whatever’s at this link
– (c) can be purchased individually.
– (d) requires “creating an account”, without $ payment – cost will be a mix of privacy violations and direct email spam. (New York Times, currently.)
This could go farther. Something that requires a subscription AND pushes ad spam has two kinds of cost (a & b). Subscription + selling data about you likewise (b & d). And there are grades within a category: Something that effectively detects ad blocking software is more expensive than something where the ads can be trivially bypassed
Also, it would be nice to have up front information before I clicked a link – will this be the 2nd of my 3 free chances this decade to sample this vendor’s wares? Or only the 1st of 10 for the week? [And who is the vendor anyway – it’s often hard to see what a link points to, without clicking on it. Yay modern software ;-(]
And now I’m curious if there’s a keyboard shortcut to make my screen reader read the URL of a focused link prior to activating it.
Chrome and Firefox both display a link URL if you hover over the link, down at the bottom of the window. Is that not what you mean?
Lots of social media does this garbage thing where they replace the url with a redirect url so that they can add data to metrics. Tumblr is especially egregrious about this, if you right click, copy link location, the paste will give you the garbage redirect url.
I thought the purpose of URL redirecting was to deny PageRank to the linked pages.
“Thou shalt not hyperlink, except to another article on the same domain” seems like a rule of many newspapers. It often frustrates me to read an article about some website, where the article contains dozen links to “related articles”, but not a single link to the website being discussed.
Yeah, it’s very common to see newspapers report on something that’s also on the web, but not link to it in their web edition. This always annoys me, since every blogger knows to do this.
@Jeffery,
If you use the Instapaper extension, you can right-click on a link and choose “Save to Instapaper” from the context menu. That works with many paywalled sites but not all.
My ideal solution:
1. Tax everyone, e.g., $100.
2. This money will be distributed to news media organisations who register for the scheme (or potentially media organisations generally).
3. Each person could choose how to distribute the $100 they were taxed to whichever news orgs they wish.
4. Remove copyright protections on news orgs that take part in this scheme.
Dean Baker had an essentially identical idea to this and to look his up to get more details.
It kind of seems like your ideal solution is to force other people to pay for things you want.
You’re right, that is ideal!
It’s a pretty small amount of money. If we decreased our military taxation by $100 per person to compensate, I doubt we would see much of a difference there.
If I add up all the things that people want a “pretty small amount” of my money to pay for, I’m pretty sure my tax burden would be well over 100%. If we add up all the things people think should be paid for by cutting “military taxation”, we’d be paying other nations to invade us.
If it’s really a “pretty small amount of money”, then pay for it out using your money. Or by cutting government programs that support your special interests.
Or we could decrease military spending by $100 and keep the $100 savings. Whether we should decrease the military budget and whether we should institute this program are completely different issues, and trying to bundle them is fallacious.
So I could read all the newspapers I want, and then send entire $100 to Slate Star Codex? I’m tempted…
Problem is, the newspapers would notice, and they would start fighting for their share of the $100. Big begging banners, Wikipedia-style? Adding a secondary paywall? Splitting the newspaper to multiple web domains, to get greater share from people whose strategy is “distribute my $100 evenly among all websites I remember reading”?
The ideological websites would probably make greatest emotional blackmail on readers to assign the $100 to them. So most of the money would go to feed Moloch. (Imagine that you mostly read two websites: one is Slate Star Codex, and the other is either Social Justice Codex or Trump Stormtrooper Codex. You know that if you don’t give a penny to Scott, he will manage somehow. But if you didn’t donate to your ideological newspaper, and your opponents did, you only have to blame yourself if tomorrow your ingroup gets exterminated by your outgroup, right? It would be completely irresponsible to donate to Scott.)
A large number of people would simply not bother to make the choice. If they never did, how would their money get distributed by default? There would be a lot of fighting over this. (To make it simple, just imagine that you have to decide how to split the unassigned money between CNN and Fox News.) If the money is split based on page views, that would be another incentive to create clickbait, and one-paragraph-per-page articles. Plus there would be technical dificulties with measuring the page views, and related cheating.
For better or worse, some part of me does wake up wanting to read an article about guns pointed at dicks, for the sheer entertainment. I logon without that specific itch, but with an itch to be entertained/distracted. And honestly, clickbait framing might help gameify that urge.
Given the proposal, I guess it’s legal to summarize the key points of a paywalled article in your own blog.
What if there were, e.g., a series of subreddits devoted to doing non-clickbaity summaries of most daily articles of these kinds of sources?
series of subreddits devoted to doing non-clickbaity summaries
/r/savedyouaclick
Haha, great! As is, it just creates the problem and solves it at the same time; it’s not somewhere one can easily go knowing it will have a summary of an article somewhere.
Btw, how do you deal with this forum? I get no notifications, I just had to search my own comment to see if there was an answer.
In theory you can get emailed notifications when there are new comments, or new follow-up comments. I’ve never tried it.
If you search for “~ n e w ~” (without the spaces) you can step through all the new comments. If you look in the upper right you should also see a collapsed list of all the new comments, time-sorted.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6hr7op/help_test_ssc_feature_reply_notifications_by_email/ is the third-party reply notification feature.
Hilarious article and agree of course, thanks Scott.
I think we should go much further with this sort of thing. Like I think comment bots should be illegal, for example. And cookies. And so many other things. Maybe the solution isn’t “ban everything” but im 95% confident the internet will be more toxic, more annoying in terms of things like paywalls, and more dominated by AI algorithms in ten years than it is today. Unless we do something. And we, like, could totally do something.
Oh, also regarding it being a “negative sum game”, the reason it breaks economic theory here is that the “perfect information” condition for economic models isnt met. Obviously, if you already had perfect information you wouldn’t read anything on the internet.
But if you treat information like a good, and the market for information as non zero-sum bc hopefully it makes us all smarter or something, then the issue here is the misleading packaging- not labeling whether the article is paywalled in this case. And misleading packaging is a common “market failure” that perhaps could be made less common both on and off the internet by trying to deal with all the liars imperfecting information and making a killing by so doing. Its pretty easy to imagine a dystopia where robots do all the real work but everyone still works 40 hrs a week as a paid liar for this or that company. And everyone’s like “shrug, we gotta work to live, and if we didnt work (e.g. promote bullshit for company x) our lives would be empty and meaningless”
It’s not only paywalls that will stop me from reading a web page – there’s also some that make you subscribe (for free) first.
Yeah with sites that require you to sign up to view content, I just don’t. So I don’t use Pinterest or sites like Zulilly.
Thank you for doing these good deeds (summarizing, linking to non-paywall preferentially & indicating if a link is a paywall).
I am in mild agreement with this post, but I love it because it feels so much more personal than a lot of the other recent posts, which I think is reflected in how active Scott has been in the comments. More like a conversation with a friend than a nugget of wisdom from a sage on a hill.
This touches on something that frustrates the hell out of me, which is that newspapers force you to subscribe (for considerable amounts of money), meaning you’re locked in with that one newspaper. With print news, at least one week I can buy The Times, the next I can buy The Guardian, so I can spend $x and distribute it however I please. Unless you have literally $100 a month to spend on newspaper subscriptions, you’ll never achieve any kind of diversity in your reading or develop a valuable sense of how different papers cover the same types of news.
Surely someone already posted this link to this chrome extension that does just what you want: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paywall/kemhkjedapfedmoaliehjgdllceafeng
But what’s really needed is an extension to auto redirect to non-paywalled alternative versions. I’ll give some thought to how one might do that.
Disagree. I think the click-based, ad-based model is nefarious, insidious, and has hidden social costs (e.g., around tracking and privacy concerns) — as they say, “if you’re getting it for free, you’re the product”.
But I think that paywall should be clearly advertised – agree with that.
I’d rather have all paywall than click-bait, though — but in a click-dominated market, I don’t think even the pay-walled outlets can avoid click-baityness.
Nobody knows how to pay for journalism. Ads, donations, subscription/paywall, government subsidy—none of them are ideal.
I think paywalls are basically unworkable for most news outlets in the face of some news outlets that are free. Otherwise, most people will just go to the free version. OTOH, the WSJ seems to be doing ok with its paywall.
I’ve made it simple. I hover the mouse pointer over the link. If it is to a publication that I know has a paywall, I don’t click. Even though they may have x number of free articles, I refuse to use them. It is frustrating, but really, it’s not that big of a burden. There is more than enough advertising supported content available that I already can’t read it all.
The problem is that there is no way to know in advance if the product is worth the price. You can look at apples, smell them, even squeeze them before buying. You can read reviews about cars and take multiple test drives. With online content you have the provider’s word only that it’s worth the price they charge.
I am to the point that if a website asks me to do any little extra thing to access their content, I’m gone. Too little benefit for the time cost. The only exception is when I am writing a paper and need scientific citations to back up my statements. I will go to the trouble to log in through my university account which costs me 5 minutes. But even in that case, the free abstract is usually sufficient to tell me IN ADVANCE if the content is worth 5 minutes.
I have two kinds of reaction to this post.
1. It’s one of the very few SSC posts that I find simply silly. As others have pointed out, clickbait proliferates in the absence of paywalls; those sites that went to paywalls did so because they saw that the only alternative future was a listicle stamping on a face forever. If there’s a model for for-profit journalism that involves neither paywalls nor clickbait, I shudder to think of the Molochian level of surveillance such an advertising-only regime would require.
2. In light of the generally parlous state of the world being discussed on the OT right now, a post that’s essentially the SSC equivalent of an old Jerry Seinfeld “What is it with those peanut packets they give you on the airplane?” routine seems blessedly welcome. Maybe that was even the exact intent?
If you’re OK being unethical and bad person, there’s a quick and easy way to skip paywalls:
Get archive.is bookmarklet, and when at paywall just click it. In 5-10 seconds, you’ll get article (demo). It works 95% of time
Reading this article prompted me to go get a Coke Zero, a beverage that has no nutritional value because it has non caloric sugar. I will buy an additional one to replace it.
Sadly, they stopped making Pepsi One. It was fun to spell things in ASCII using Pepsi One and Coke Zero cans.
I subscribed to the WSJ. It’s totally worth it. I decided to stop letting the internet mob pick my news for me. I don’t want an algorithm feeding me content it thinks I’ll like. When you refuse to pay for news, you are at the mercy of what the “free” sites feel like showing you. Since you are not paying them, what are they getting in return?
Influence. It’s propaganda. You’re being led around the internet and having opinions shoved at you. The purpose is to make you angry or upset for political gain (theirs- not yours). I regularly tell my elderly mother to stop reading the news because it’s written to upset people, particularly older people. I’m sure Scott runs into this at work- the news seems to be tailored to send people to therapy. That’s intentional.
Instead of garbage news that gets passed around I can read about what’s really happening in the world. The WSJ doesn’t bandwagon onto whatever the Twitter mob is angry about. They have actual reporters who go out and investigate things.
During the impeachment mess (remember that?), when other papers (NYT in particular) were filling their front page with a story that went nowhere, the WSJ gave it a spot and then filled the rest with the news.
I find that I get information my internet friends don’t have, on a daily basis, because the clickbait sites aren’t pushing it.
It’s relatively apolitical, with the opinion on the opinion page, where it belongs. The WSJ certainly has an opinion, but they don’t exist to spread it. They exist to be profitable.
If the paper were garbage, I wouldn’t pay for it. I think that’s fair. Complaining because something isn’t free, when the “free” stuff is crap, is missing the point.
I am sure fans of the NYT, BBC, etc have an equally glowing opinion of their favored publication, and are equally critical of the WSJ.
How in the world would people be critical of what the WSJ covers when the WSJ is paywalled and they can’t see it?
He’s right that if you aren’t paying, you are the product. By paying you have the power of exit [1] and you get news coverage of things without the newspaper trying to sell you more things.
[1] Of course, WSJ takes away that power by making it unconscionably hard to cancel.
I almost always think posts on here are really good. This is not one of those instances. In fact, it’s probably the lowest of the lows.
JFC.
This is a rather odd attitude. Okay, Scott has a point of view that you think is terrible. He’s presented a lengthy explanation of how he came to that point of view (or, if you want to be a bit more cynical, how he rationalizes that point of view), and has provided space in which you can challenge that point of view, present arguments for your point of view, and explain why you think his argument is flawed. Scott’s view, in some form, is likely prevalent among the public, and he has provided you with a forum in which you can engage with it and possibly convert one of the people who hold it. Instead your response consists just of “JFC”.
Allowing people to discuss how they have attitudes that are possibly irrational, and other people to discuss them civilly and respectfully explain why they think the attitude is irrational, is a valuable social norm. Scott isn’t advocating outlawing paywalls, he’s simply telling you what his view is. If you don’t care what his view is, you can simply move on. If you do care, then him telling you is valuable information, and responding to be given valuable information with nothing but criticism isn’t productive and arguably ungrateful. Would you rather have people tell you that they would prefer no newspapers to there being paywalled newspapers, or would you rather people just going around thinking that it would be better if there were no newspapers, without ever telling you that they feel this way and giving you an opportunity to persuade them otherwise?
They’re dramatically overshooting the style guide. I don’t agree with their stance, but see where they’re coming from.
No it doesn’t, as you acknowledge later. That part of the response is juxtaposed to a quote from Scott’s piece, and that context is much of the informational content. Specifically, that said line from Scott is obviously bad in a way that is so obvious it can go without saying. (And of course the first few lines of their comment indicate that it’s serving as an example of a wider issue, but that’s not an argument I’ll make.)
I don’t like that style of comment for multiple reasons, the most salient of which that its utility craters when the inferential distance is wider than expected. But it’s not nothing, and can be built upon with a little effort.
(Substantively, I do think it’s a bad line. But I doubt my reasons for thinking so are what TheTurtleMoves had in mind, so there’s still an issue.)
I sort of knew someone would write some version of this, but look:
This post is so bad I’m not going to quibble about it. Just imagine living in a world without newspapers for a year.
And what’s the justification: VICE runs clickbait? (and also actually some great reporting, by the way) Oh and these crappy paywalls are _so annoying_. Please.
I’m sorry, no. I don’t need to break this one down. It just gives more credence to an argument that has none. Everyone on this site is on this site because people did the hard work to inform them well enough that they woke up. A great many (not all, but many) had business cards in their wallets that had the word “Reporter” on it.
We all know the news industry is in a bad way right now. It’s doing dumb things on the way to a better business model. And I hope someone finds it. I believe they will. In the meantime, though, we still need them. You know, the ones that are left. Because they are mostly gone.
Fin.
Paywalls are an inconvenience mainly when it’s a source you’re never going to want to read again. If I want to read a linked article in the local paper in San Diego, I’m not going to subscribe–it’s on the other side of the country, I’m never going to read enough articles to pay for it!
They’re also an inconvenience when you want to share/discuss something online. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and while many of their stories are really excellent, I can’t link to them because they’re paywalled and only subscribers get access. That’s fine, and I’m glad they’ve found a way to keep their quality up in the current world, but it does mean I can’t just link and get everyone to read this excellent article I just found.
Do you have any ideas for how to pay for news that would align incentives toward “get the best available picture of reality and report it” rather than “write things that make the subscribers/donors feel good about themselves” or “write the grabbiest possible clickbait so we can sell ads?” As far as I can tell, nobody has a great answer to that question.
Right now, I live someplace (a suburban county with about a million people in it) with no local news outlet. There’s probably a lot of bad stuff going on in the dark, because nobody can figure out how to make a living reporting on the doings of local government and the goings on in our county. This looks like a genuine problem. But I doubt you could make a local news source with either ads or a paywall and make a viable business.
Empirically, about 1/3 corporate sponsorship, 1/3 membership fees from subsidiaries, 1/6 direct contribution from consumers, and 1/6 assorted others.
I’m joking to a degree, but consider what exactly is being sought: we’re looking for something free at point of use, easily available to the public, comprehensive in coverage, and consistently accurate enough to be a plausible authority. Unspoken but just as crucial is that it must be fairly popular (or else you’d never hear of it) and relatively nonpartisan (or “you” would dismiss it). All media criticism must first grapple with the idea that this might be an overconstrained set of demands.
Agree it’s a silly post.
Moreover I’m shocked that Scott does not already subscribe to NYT, Wapo, WSJ etc. A “public intellectual “ without such such subscriptions is like a TV critic who doesn’t subscribe to Netflix
“If someone wants more than the one-sentence summary, they can click the link, but I’ve done A/B testing on this and it never happens.”
I think this is a scathing indictment, not on paywalls, but on the entire profession of journalism. Approximately 90% of the time, when I click on an article (or when I read an article in an actual paper newspaper), what I really want is a one- or two-sentence summary of what’s going on. That’s literally all I need. That I have to read several—sometimes many—paragraphs to find out what I want to know is a deep and massively frustrating inefficiency.
I think the problem is that most mainstream journalism outputs (articles, TV segements, etc.) are of some sort of worst-of-all-worlds, “intermediate” length/depth.
To understand something superficially (what most people are looking for) requires only a well written 1-2 sentence summary, as you say.
To understand something in-depth requires a multi page summary of research (something like an SSC post or one of the better effort-posts).
But journalists try to go for something in the middle with a 5-10 paragraph article, that never really truly gets into the detail necessary the develop a true understanding, but also wastes a lot of time trying to imply that the author totally could do that if they wanted to.
I think it is even worse, because the intermediate length usually does not bring the intermediate depth. It is a superficial depth with many unnecessary sentences added. This is most obvious with cooking recipes, but most of journalism is like that.
Someone really trying to explain the topic to lay audience, but artificially limited to 10 paragraphs, would write a much better text.
Because they want you to click to all the related articles. Which, unfortunately, are written the same way.
And this again makes it even worse, because the website usually provides five intermediate-length articles on the same topic, all with shallow depth. Within so much space, one deep article could have been written.
As someone who recently got into cooking, this annoys me to no end. Every online recipe contains pages of gushing about how awesome $FOOD is that you have to scroll through before you can find the actual recipe. At least the recipes are usually distinctively formatted so they’re easy to pick out.
The part that really annoys me about recipes is when you look to find a good recipe for something and it appears to be relatively easy to make with ingredients you have on hand, and a really good rating.
Then you see a 5-star rating that somebody gave it, with a comment that resembles, “This recipe was sooooo good! Except I thought it looked like it had too much vinegar, so I reduced it by half. I also substituted half brown sugar for the white sugar, used fennel instead of thyme, and added a drop of unicorn tears. It came out great! 5 stars”
Fffffffff….
Funny, I read it as a scathing indictment of the readership. You get what you pay for, and most of the time you aren’t paying with money.
So read Axios. That’s their whole thing.
Before the Internet, it used to be that way all the time. You actually had to pay money to get a subscription to a newspaper.
And people knew what they were getting. You could find literally hundreds of their old works published in just the past year if you to the library.
I get the complaints about paywalls for a-la-carte articles. Deciding that a specific article is worth money is too high a mental hurdle.
But it’s pretty easy to find out what, say, The New York Times [1] or The Washington Post or The Wall street Journal are, and what’s they’re going to probably continue to do. And if cancelling is easy, people should sign up and give it a shot.
[1] Well, I have no idea what The New York Times is going to be like next month, since their publisher just gave every worker permission to call him if they’re uncomfortable by anything published.
Definitely agree that a la carte payment at a reasonable amount needs to happen and there needs to be a way to do it where the mental hurdle is negligible. For a variety of reasons (among them, the USAPATRIOT Act) that’s just not really feasible right now, which is too bad. Hopefully we’ll get there.
But canceling is not easy. It’s actually inordinately, absurdly, and deliberately difficult.
Agree that this is insanity making and not okay.
Still thinking about this. There’s a level on which at least part of this post is like saying:
Hostess cupcakes are bad for people.
Grocery stores sell Hostess cupcakes.
We should shut down grocery stores if they won’t stop selling Hostess cupcakes.
Paywalls have been a very frustrating problem when researching Alcoholics Anonymous’s efficacy. Back in 2014 and 2015, mainstream journalists were willing to accept and publish artificially low figures for AA’s “success rate” without researching the underlying science, in a large part because the underlying science was paywalled and, as a result, not readily available.
Since then, good studies showing AA efficacy for some alcoholics have come out and are, by and large, open access, or will become open open access. The recently published big study showing AA efficacy, the 2020 Cochrane Review on Alcoholics Anonymous, which got a lot of press earlier this year, will become open access next year some time; the older Cochrane Review on AA remains behind a paywall.
This post is trivial as composed: Journalism is bad, they should stop charging money for it, that way there will be less of the bad thing.
The more interesting post explores the assumption:
Is any value added by professional journalism?
Under what circumstances do hobbyists do what professionals used to do, but better? e.g. Scott does psych research for free through his blog. but that would not justify defunding university psychology departments. YouTube hosts a lot of content, but people still like to pay for Netflix. etc.
Also:
If we rely only on volunteers, does the focus of journalism shift even more to the interests of those who can afford free time?
Is the median piece of journalism bad because the marginal piece of clickbait is bad?
Is paid journalism bad because free journalism adds so little value?
The economics of journalism are also intriguing:
Is there any equilibrium possible in a competitive market where the marginal cost of attracting a reader is zero?
Do we need market power to provide a revenue stream for journalism?
Can Bundling work? The Cable TV model / Netflix Model where you susbcirbe once and don’t feel like you’re getting nickel-and-dimed.
I feel this issue could also be framed as “the problem with advertising”. Clickbait is a form of advertising (whether or not there is money involved or the user gets money from the product).
The solutions still apply here, especially the first seems like it would work (I think I should be able to filter/rate news sites, rather than rely on Google for the best source for a story). But the third “stop using such unethical techniques in advertising” is an old problem that disadvantages those who comply, and gives an advantage to those who don’t.
I only say this because it seems one of the reasons for the decline in news article quality (my opinion) is the increased treatment of articles as (self) advertising (e.g. of an author, opinion, ideology, point of view), and the headline (clickbait or not) is part of the ad.
In this context, I think you could defend paywall as a better alternative to self-advertising, but I’m not sure that works in practise today for the paywalls I see.
Personally, I think a (very small) pay-per-read business model might work. E.g. 5c/article. I think Brave/BAT seems to be trying something similar? You may not value your attention/time but over time you may put a more accurate dollar value on the article.
Perhaps it has never seemed to you that capitalism creates needs only it can fulfill except in this case, because you are a person who is unusually motivated by information rather than material concerns, and others who are more motivated by material concerns experience capitalism creating-wants-then-charging-for-fulfillment more along that axis.
Certainly there do seem to be rather a lot of products which no one *really* needs which are remarkable successes.
I used Blendle a little but the friction I wasn’t able to reliably overcome was deciding whether any particular article was worth $0.25 (or whatever; I think some were cheaper). Those individual small amounts can add up fast if you read a lot.
It used to be that most sites that had paywalls would turn them off if the referer was a search engine or a social network like twitter. (In fact, this is how browser extensions that bypassed paywalls usually worked: they spoofed the referer header to be google. Other extensions just blocked cookies, but those tended to interfere with sites where the user already had an account.) Some sites still do this — Medium being the most obvious example.
While I dislike advertising-based monetization so much that I generally prefer almost any alternative, paywalls tend to be run by individual outlets (or, at best, individual publishing platforms — again, Medium seems to be the only site that will put up a paywall for posts written by ordinary users & give those users a cut of the income without demanding strict editorial oversight & preapproval for publishing), and so paywalled news/blogging sites tend to combine the worst of ad-driven revenue models (clickbait, content-mill fluff) with the worst of subscription content stacks like Netflix (traffic driven by a handful of high-profile exclusive properties that get special treatment, content-mill fluff to fudge the numbers about how much content is available). It also tends to re-use the same invasive and ethically-dubious ad-tech shit for evading user-side monetization evasion (ex., the same tech used for ad-blocker-blockers is used for paywall-blocker-blockers).
As a Xanadu fanboy, of *course* I’m going to recommend transcopyright as the appropriate solution for this: you create a standard, host-agnostic protocol for requesting and paying for content & make sure several escrow providers & content providers sign on to support it, and you let people pay by the byte (producing UI facilities for microtransactions in reading). Maybe some of these escrow providers would take subscriptions & use your balance to pay for articles (after taking their cut), or maybe they’d be more like prepaid phones where you keep some balance & top it off if you need more. Maybe you’d keep accounts with several escrow providers and switch between them mid-document as a means of hiding what you’re reading.
To restate the bad article problem in a different way:
Consumer A has an incentive, Sr, which is informed by some form of information, S+.
S- is an alternative source of information about Sr which is not useful for increasing Sr, but which is similar to S+
S- is then easily confused with S+ by Consumer A
Producer B can profit then either by providing S+ or by providing S-
If S- is more profitable for Producer B than S+ then S- will be provided more, and S+ will be provided less.
In the above example:
Your Sr is probably preventing dangerous activities or something similar
The S- is the VICE headline about guns
The S+ is information which is useful for preventing dangerous activities
Similar concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
The problem with buying information is that if you need to buy it, you most probably can’t verify it. Which creates an incentive to give the most profitable (for the seller) information, rather than the most correct one. Most profitable can mean cheaper to produce, such as making up stuff instead of researching things, or sponsored, like giving you the information someone paid me to give you.
Fact checking? That just passes the buck. How do you know the fact-checking site provides you correct information instead of pushing their own agenda? (A meta-fact-checking site? Same problem.)
Also, most people care about things other than factual correctness. People read mainstream news to cultivate a self-image of “a reasonable person”, or read fringe websites to cultivare a self-image of “fearless truth-seeker”. Catering to their self-image is more profitable that obsessing over facts.
There are a small selection of news outlets I pay for because I like their content. I don’t know what it is like in the states, but I find in the UK the clickbait newspapers are also the free ones… the paywall ones have informative or at least none intentionally risible headlines.
This is an opportunity for GPT-3 to summarize such articles. There exists an entire Twitter account (I forget which one) about burying the lede; it posts a link to a clickbait article, and just tells you the one-sentence answer to the question posed in the headline. A GPT-3 process might be able to automate this.
Such a service sounds like something Douglas Adams would have invented. “The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder… Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.” Replace believe with click-on.
“The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder… Electric Monks clicked and read articles for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of clicking and reading all the things the world expected you to click and read.”