
Problems with Paywalls - litling
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/
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lukifer
This is a classic market failure / coordination problem. Most of us understand
the articles don't write themselves (AI summaries and fake news bots
notwithstanding), first party research and fact-checking is time-consuming and
expensive, and newspapers are merely responding to cutthroat market pressures.
There's zero Slack [0] in the online news business.

I think it's more a problem of convenience than refusal to pay. I continue to
find it surprising that browsers haven't made a more aggressive push into
business models for micro-payments, or Netflix-style clustered content
subscriptions, where each article incurs zero marginal cost, and some fixed
recurring stream is divvied up based on what is read. I get why Google doesn't
do this, so as to not cannibalize the bread and butter of their ad revenue,
but it seems to align with Mozilla's and Apple's interests, and a
differentiator against the current market leader. Brave [1] is at least a good
start.

If we _really_ wanted to disincentivize clickbait fluff (not to mention
abysmal reading experiences), maybe even give sites/articles a little extra
share in response to browser-integrated micro-surveys. Readers usually know
when they're being bullshitted, and when they've consumed something of
substance, and I suspect would be eager to reward/punish accordingly.

[0] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-
slack/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/)

[1] [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

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simonblack
I have a simple solution to paywalls.

I block those websites permanently.

So yes, I _".. refuse their deal – and so be left no worse off than if they
didn’t exist"_ as the author puts it.

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allarm
Sadly you can’t block them in google search results.

