
The Free and Open Internet - mooreds
https://avc.com/2019/02/the-free-and-open-internet/
======
pointillistic
That free model that Wilson louds got us to this point in the first place.
Over last twenty years that Wilson been making money investing in free
Twitter, etc., thousands of people lost jobs in journalism, etc. He has no
solution or suggestion, just ranting. Isn't he the freemium guy anyhow?

~~~
ui-explorer12
add to your points this gem:

>> places like Twitter and Medium that remain open and free.

WHAT? Perhaps only in the most literal sense of "they don't make you pay money
to read", but that's not really what people mean when they talk about open and
free...

~~~
phishfi
Not to mention how much of Medium is behind their paywall...

~~~
keerthiko
yeah was gonna say Medium literally makes you pay money to read now.

------
simplecomplex
> Sure I could have purchased a subscription to the Washington Post, but I
> don’t believe opinion pieces should be behind a paywall and I certainly
> don’t believe that something like Dingell’s last words should be behind a
> paywall.

Quite cheap for a millionaire (billionaire?)! Just think about that for a
second. It’s comical. Newspapers were never free. Ever. People subscribed or
bought them in a vending machine or news stand.

> have ceded their role as the public square to places like Twitter and Medium
> that remain open and free.

They aren’t free. They both burn massive amounts of cash. Medium isn’t
profitable and Twitter lost money for 12 years before stuffing it with ads to
turn a profit. Oh and most importantly, Twitter doesn’t have to pay a single
journalist or reporter! Hard for a VC to understand, but WaPo is actually
concerned with making money.

> But the way paywalls are implemented today stinks. Some content should never
> ever be put behind one.

Well that’s just like your opinion, man. WaPo has been profitable under this
model.

~~~
paulgb
Moreover, WaPo gives a few free articles per month so it's not like this is a
one-off where he wanted to read a WaPo article. I can't fathom being in an
industry like VC and not having a subscription to all the major papers even
just to skim articles that mention portfolio companies.

------
JHH_18
No. Just no. I have downloaded a truly obscene amount of material from the net
for the actually tiny fees which ISPs require for access. From 100,000 college
grad guides & books to 10,000 "magic" program and production systems, I'm only
curious. The Internet leaks and leaks, and how can you make any money?

------
CryptoPunk
I think cryptocurrency-based microtransactions would be perfect for paying for
online content. If browser-based wallets become a thing, making a $0.01
payment to read an article would be easy, painless and potentially sustain
online media.

------
AHatLikeThat
Why is the fault even the Post's? The Dingell family (or Dingell himself)
decided to sell the piece to the Post, a revenue-generating newspaper that
uses a paywall. They had many other options. They probably could have gotten
another senator to read it into the Federal Register, where it would have been
available to all. But they made their choice.

------
S_A_P
I don’t see any way to solve the paywall problem except to have Spotify for
news/written content.* Even then there are too many hands reaching into my
wallet to the point where I just don’t read some things.

*Until there is a universal web currency that is low friction to send like some of the crypto currencies.

~~~
lunchables
>*Until there is a universal web currency that is low friction to send like
some of the crypto currencies.

I see this idea pop up every day now. It blows my mind that we don't have it
yet. It seems so obvious, why hasn't someone written it yet? Can someone just
pick a cryptocurrency that doesn't have high transaction fees and make a few
browser plugins? Add your payment address to ./well-known or something?

~~~
AgentME
The Brave Browser ([https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)) is attempting
something like this. (I expect compatible plugins for other browsers could be
made in the future if its system takes off.)

There are complications that make this not super straight-forward to pull off.
Low fees in cryptocurrency currently is usually done by having low activity.
(There are several projects attempting to solve this in a decentralized way,
including the Bitcoin Lightning Network and various Ethereum projects.) Then
there's privacy issues.

------
JHH_18
The very simplest of reader tactics. On the Internet, for anything posted,
it's stored when read, elsewhere after the read. Web2 is built atop the
structure engeineered to provide millitary communication in the "nuke war"
scenerio. How will you keep your copy in that scenerio?

------
equalunique
I recommend taking a look at the good discussion happening in the comments
section of that blog article.

~~~
ceph_
I can't tell if that's sarcasm. What good discussion are you referring to?

It's not as bad as what I'd normally see on an article. But I don't see much
of value. Just a bunch of people sharing anecdotes as to why the death of the
news industry is good/bad/deserved.

~~~
equalunique
It's not sarcasm. I genuinely found the anecdotes which I saw interesting. The
current top rated comment there has a good point on the effects of being
public vs. private on news organizations. Further down is a comment so long it
could be a HN submission on it's own (and FYI, it's not about the death of the
news industry).

------
kotrunga
Thanks for the article! Unfortunately I don’t think Medium is an “open”
platform, there are paywalls there too.

The other thing I think we need to be careful about is having a “federated”
source for the paywalls. To me, this is a scary idea. Unless the solution is
open source and completely encrypted, it will just give whichever companies
that do it more access to your data, on what you read, when you read it, and
what you pay for.

------
fredsted
> Even the Washington Post’s owner Jeff Bezos knew to publish his words that
> he wanted everyone to read on an open platform like Medium.

Medium is definitely not free. I always get paywalls when I visit it.

------
ErikAugust
The article Fred was looking for, without the paywall:
[https://beta.trimread.com/articles/27](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/27)

------
benj111
"but I don’t believe opinion pieces should be behind a paywall"

Why not (assuming you aren't totally against paywalls)?

I can understand being against basic news reporting being behind a paywall,
but opinion is like a newpaper's value add, it's USP.

------
codetrotter
> paywalls should federate, like the early ATMs did, so that joining one means
> joining them all

That’s an interesting idea. I imagine it could work sort of like Spotify
Premium but with a twist. Perhaps that is not what he meant but it’s what I
came to think of so that’s what I want to talk about.

Of course the real problem is getting all/enough/any of the paywall sites to
switch. I’ll get back to this but for now let’s ignore that problem.

How the system will work: There is a payment processor (could be one of the
existing payment processors or a new company) that provides the federated
system to the paywalled sites. The payment processor handles billing of end-
users and once per month it pays the paywall sites according to the
proportional amount of articles (another problem I’ll get back to) that each
user read on each site.

This is similar to the Patreon and other recurring payments services except
that payment is calculated automatically similar to how Spotify does it
instead of having the end-user decide the amount they want to give to each
site. This is done for a couple of reasons. Firstly the point was to lower
friction for end-users, so we don’t want them to have to individually set the
proportions for each site. Secondly, if end-users were to set the proportions
then they might forget to update them.

But there are more problems, both for the end-user and for the paywalled
sites. End-users might derive more value from some sites than others. In the
extreme case there could be two or more sites where one site had a _really_
_really_ good article that the end-user derived _a lot_ of value from but in
the same month they read a lot of content on the other site/sites that did not
provide them with anywhere near the value of the single only article they read
on the other site. And yet they end up giving most of their money to the sites
that provided them with less value.

And that problem is further made bigger by this system encouraging the paywall
sites to make more clickbait and to use other kinds of tactics to increase the
number of articles read just as with the ad-supported model.

So one way to try and combat that is perhaps to use amount of time spent on
each site instead of number of pages loaded. Amount of time spent _would_ be a
better metric if users simply navigated away as soon as they found some
content to be of little interest. And we already know that they do so on the
web in general. So it _might_ work to a certain degree. At least it rewards
the sites for content that users chose to stay consuming than content that
they were simply tricked into loading but which they quickly determined to be
not worth their time.

Of course it could still lead to articles that are longer and so take more
time to read, while staying sufficiently interesting that readers stick to
them. In fact I am pretty sure that this not just could but _would_ happen.
We’ve already seen sites split articles into multiple pages to increase the
number of ad impressions they can serve. To instead insert filler content into
interesting content within a single article is not much different from that.
So while not optimizing simply for pageloads, publishers are still highly
likely to optimize for time spent rather than as we ideally would want them to
be optimizing purely for value to the end-user.

You could then have a scoring system that allows the user to score each piece
of content, kind of like how HN and Reddit has upvotes and downvotes but where
you use the scores that each individual user gave to each piece of content
when you calculate the proportional division of money that will go from each
individual user to the publishers of each piece of content that said
individual user consumed that month. But first of all this increases friction
once again, which is what we want to avoid, and secondly it encourages
publishers to manipulate users into giving a high score. And publishers who
made good content and did not remind users to “please give this article a good
score if you enjoyed it” would once again get the short end of the stick. And
on top of that nobody bothers to score _every_ piece of content that they come
by — but that can be accounted for with some maths, the main problem is the
friction and incentivizing publishers to manipulate users about the scoring
like I mentioned.

There’s a lot of other things to consider as well, but I’ll round off this
comment now with my thoughts on adoption.

On getting sites to switch: I think at the core there are three factors that
would determine whether paywalled sites would use this federated system.

One, revenue. Will the paywall sites earn _more_ by using the federated
system? With the lower friction of a federated paywall system, it _could_ ,
but even if there are more subscribed users the sites are also getting only a
portion of what each user is paying and the sum of those payments might add up
to less than fewer users paying a site directly.

Two, adoption. In order for the system to work in terms of offering lower
friction to the end user, high adoption among paywalled sites is required. In
the beginning, before adoption is high, why would any paywall site agree to
adopt it? A chicken and egg problem.

Three, trust. Will paywalled sites trust the provider of the federated system
to be honest and pay them the amount that they should?

~~~
marcus_holmes
With Spotify and Netflix, you measure engagement by how many times a piece was
listened to/viewed, and the only measure is popularity.

With advertising-based journalism, you measure engagement by clicks - which is
bad because it gives us clickbait. You can argue about whether there is
clickbait in music and video, but we know that clickbait in journalism is
definitely a problem.

In an ideal world, there would be a simple measure of how
good/relevant/interesting/informative a news or opinion article is. I don't
think anyone has discovered that yet. To my mind, this is the core problem. If
we can solve "how to measure objective quality in journalism", then we can
apply all sorts of business models to it. All the current business models fall
short not because the model is inherently flawed, but because they reward bad
journalism. If how much an advert paid the publisher was linked to how good
the article was, then we'd have good journalism. As it is now, we reward
clickbait-y high-volume low-quality journalism, so that's what we get.

~~~
zozbot123
> You can argue about whether there is clickbait in music and video, but we
> know that clickbait in journalism is definitely a problem.

There definitely is clickbait in video - see Youtube recommendations. In the
long run, we should move towards funding content by crowdfunding and open
licensing, perhaps combined with a reasonably short embargo period where the
content is limited to subscribers. This gives the right long-run incentives,
while avoiding either paywalls (after the embargo) or intrusive ad tracking.

------
webwanderings
As much as I was in awe of WaPo's tablet app (on Amazon's Fire), I despise
their website on the public Internet ever since they have started the paywall
flags. Neither NYT, nor WaPo are going to solve the world's publishing
business model on the Internet. The author here makes a lot of good points.
And someone please tell me exactly why Bezo wrote his letter on Medium and not
anywhere else?

~~~
marcus_holmes
if the owner of a newspaper decides what it publishes, that newspaper is no
longer considered to have "editorial freedom". This is a very important thing
to journalists.

I can totally understand why it's less hassle all round for Bezos to publish
in Medium, or the NYT, or any other publication than the one he owns.

~~~
zozbot123
If the "owners" of a newspaper don't have final authority about what it
publishes, they aren't the real owners/publishers in the first place; they
just provide funding to it, and perhaps own its branding. It's understandable
that journalists like "editorial freedom", because it's a de-facto property
right. Who wouldn't like that sort of thing?

~~~
icebraining
That's the curious thing: the owner does have final authority, but if they
choose to exert it, they lose what they own (as the character of the
publication changes).

Like the King in the Little Prince, their authority is absolute, but only if
they are reasonable :)

------
whoisjuan
I despise paywalls and not because I'm cheap. If I see good value I'd pay for
it. I already do it for books, movies and music.

But paywalls are not different from the old model of selling print
subscriptions, and that's my problem. I don't see the value of paying for an
article of the WaPo or NYT. If I susbcribe then I had to consume that media
daily and read several articles to make that subscription worth it and I won't
do that. Reading daily news is neither motivating or important for me.

So paywalls for me are just deterrents. I will never get converted into a pay
user and they are just another reason for me to go and look for alternative
media or simply rely on Twitter with all its biases and shortcomes.

~~~
otoburb
>> _If I susbcribe then I had to consume that media daily and read several
articles to make that subscription worth it and I won 't do that._

Why do you feel compelled to read several articles per day to make that
subscription worth it? I presume the answer is because you think current
subscription prices are too expensive. Perhaps this compulsion would be
dampened if the subscription price were lower -- but by how much?

~~~
phishfi
Or better yet, a service existed that paid per view. Microtransactions, for
example, could pay per article read in a similar way to Medium's system
(although it would be better if there was just a wallet that it paid from,
without a minimum monthly charge). I know Brave is working toward that goal,
and I like what they're doing, but I'd prefer if their system was universal (I
refuse to use their browser).

------
JHH_18
I have seven T of Junk in my bunk, and dudes, When are you going to get
realistic pricing for the native explorers? and pron? A pittance, but
sometimes it's hard to get it off. Brains are worth enlightening,but whats a
fair cost? Would you follow me around forever? If the net disappeared, I
wouldn't/couldn't read all this again... (Oh, filing sys.)

------
kwccoin
For that case, it should use the economist model of you have x free article
per month. Then those really burn you like an orange head waving his hair you
can read. Or the last word of X.

The title is a bit problematic though. What is meant by free and open if 1/5
of human beings are not allowed to read anything written in English be
default. You may argue that is because of their government and people deserve
... But no. I blame it on Internet very design. We were told in 1990s that it
is free and open. At worst the commence may have to be tolerant but we can at
least offer ourselves and others may. That is within that context this article
is. But what we have missed in this context the infrastructure of Internet is
not free and open. It is in fact not just closed but a means to monitor every
word without a chance to delete.

Free and Open. RIP the last words of Internet.

