
Unbearable news - zuhayeer
https://zainamro.com/notes/unbearable-news
======
bradgessler
I always plug my news website,
[https://legiblenews.com/](https://legiblenews.com/), when I read about the
state of news on the web because I too feel this frustration. It got so bad I
decided to create a news website that:

1\. Loads in one request. Seriously, load it in your browser with the network
inspector open. One request.

2\. Is private. I don’t care who reads it. I provide this as a public service
and have no interest in running targeted ads.

3\. Links to source content. This is the worst thing about news websites
today: the articles summarize complex issues and rarely link to source
documents because they want to keep you on their website and pump you full of
more ads. I joke that “you might accidentally learn something if you click one
of the links” because it loads Wikipedia articles.

I get why people read paper news. It’s private, no pop-ups, and is fast.
Legible News is as close as I could get to that. I hope you enjoy!

~~~
baby
I too thought about these issues. There are two major problems I see with news
websites these days:

\- facts mixed with opinions \- cherry picked and maliciously re-ordered facts

The first one you seem to have taken care of

The second one I’m thinking of some solutions:

\- random order (per visit) of news item on the page \- each news item focuses
on one information at the same time \- each news item comes with “context”.
This is the hard part because context can be cherry picked and ordered.

~~~
powerapple
Do people read news about facts or opinions? I think the latter was actually
more valuable. People follow their favourite columnists and reporters on
papers because of their in-depth analysis and opinions on issues, rather than
plain cold facts.

~~~
baby
But that is a major problem right? You are consuming digested news that is
obviously biased. There is no way of getting out of your bubble if you consume
news like this.

There is a spectrum between difficult to consume raw news and completed
digested news.

------
cleandreams
I subscribe to the paper version of my local paper because it is so much
easier to actually get information from. It's so well designed. I think the
reason people have gravitated to online news is herd mentality. What I like
about paper news: my focus is more under my control. I can evaluate and skim
whole articles at once. I am not constrained by what if visible in the window.
Also, no distractions. Every time I open my computer or phone I am waylaid by
distractions. I am a software / AI engineer and I think we have created a
dystopia.

One thing I am seriously afraid of is that our tech dystopia will drive local
newspapers out of business. I hate to think of what that will do for
corruption, inefficiency, everything. Just awful. I dread the day my local
newspaper announces they are ceasing publication. The reduction is staffing
over the last 15 or 20 years is incredible. I think the San Jose Mercury went
from 1800 to 35. That is depressing.

~~~
hilbertseries
Yea, pretty much 100% the web is destroying news. Everyone wants a free ad
supported product now and the only way that model works is if you get enough
page views. So news websites have to prioritize content that generates views,
rather than good reporting. Which is slowly killing journalism.

~~~
Swizec
This has always been the case in physical news as well. You live and die by
your readership (views). Real money always came from ads.

~~~
hansthehorse
Back in the day a very significant percentage of revenue came from the
classifieds.

~~~
DrScump
The San Jose Mercury-News used to be hugely profitable for exactly this
reason. They had the biggest classified section of any paper in the country.
The Monday edition was maybe 4X as thick as its modern equivalent.

------
donohoe
This is completely true and frustrating. It is possible to have fast loading
web pages that incorporate decent levels of ads but making that change is
hard.

I track 60 or so news sites (mostly US and EU based) and as of today:

    
    
      On a "Fast 3G" connection
      the average article takes 45 seconds to load 
      and is 3.8mb in size.
    

_Article Performance Leaderboard_ (Site):
[https://webperf.xyz/](https://webperf.xyz/)

 _Data and Speed Tests:_
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Cz...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c1zhkdvWE0WvG84TT3Czekj0N-0sRUEBKO3c0Aeflxw/edit#gid=1790251413)

The Harry Potter ebook is 1.3MB in size yet we wrap 25kb text of a news
article in all this unnecessary crap.

It is all avoidable, even without AMP.

~~~
3xblah
"The New Yorker

The average load time is 102.127 seconds

431 requests"

Author is asking for "text-only"; this of course only requires one request.

    
    
       curl -4o https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane | tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' | sed 's/</\
       &/g;s// /g;s/ *//;' #tab |sed -n '/./{/sectionBreak/,/<\/div>/p;/figcaption/,/<\/figcaption/p;}' > a.htm
    
       firefox a.htm
    

We do not need a complex, graphical browser that autoloads resources and runs
Javascript in order to request or display a page of text-only content. "Reader
Mode" is great but it is not available for every website.

The time spent by the browser on those 431 requests is significant. What if a
simpler client was used, e.g.,

    
    
       time printf "GET /magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.newyorker.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" |openssl s_client -connect www.newyorker.com:443 -ign_eof > /dev/null
    
       curl -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane
    
       time tnftp -4o /dev/null https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane
    
       time links -dump https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane > /dev/null
    

Guess how many seconds this one request takes when we do not use a popular
graphical browser to make it

------
possibleworlds
The Guardian website, whilst not perfect according to the standards of the
article and some other posts, is very performant. They have ads and other
dynamic content, but load is deferred on this stuff and wrapped properly to
avoid reflow, so the entirety of the article text is immediately readable.
Just for interest, see also their tech blog [0] and their entire frontend on
GitHub [1].

I can ignore ads, but what I find incredible on major (insert
news/tech/whatever here) sites is the reflow from not properly reserving space
for both ads and lazyloaded images. The following seems particularly to be a
problem on mobile and in apps like Apple News: load a page, scroll to the meat
of the article, then experience 1, 2, 3 page jumps as stuff loads in above
your scroll position.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-
blog](https://www.theguardian.com/info/series/digital-blog) [1]
[https://github.com/guardian/frontend](https://github.com/guardian/frontend)

~~~
aembleton
I often find switching off Javascript helps with the reflow issues.

~~~
awinter-py
can't agree more with both of these comments -- JS has zero user value for
news sites, only contributes to annoying. and reflow on most news sites is
intolerable -- it's like FOUC in the old days (flash of unstyled content), but
way worse because of all the different ways assets get loaded and laid out.

------
danso
> _I suggest they become more creative with their business model or at least
> try to see the value in moderation._

The vast majority of news sites were free from the get-go, with the NYT being
one of the first major websites to put up a website [0]. That's roughly 20
years of giving free content out on the web. The author is (partially _) right
that "the article text is all anyone really cares about". The thing is,
plaintext is absurdly easy to disseminate and copy.

_ for most of the history of newspapers, ads were themselves a reason to get
the newspaper, especially for coupons and classified ads. Of course, print
ads, like print pages, were much more deliberately and better designed than
what we experience today online.

[0] [https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-
nytimes...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-com-
debuted-on-line-on-the-web/)

~~~
DrScump
The San Jose Mercury-News and WSJ both had full-content websites before NYT.

The Mercury-News even had a selective email feed of wire service content
called _Newshound_. For $5 a month, you got up to 5 "hounds" (sets of search
criteria), and every article matching your criteria was individually emailed
to you, whether a wire story, a syndicate story, or one internally generated
within Knight-Ridder. This was in 1993 if not earlier yet.

~~~
danso
Yeah definitely the Merc News was a pioneer on the web and in many other ways:
[https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_s...](https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php)

It's hard to imagine now, but papers like the Merc News – thanks to basically
having a virtual monopoly – were basically printing presses for money. They
most definitely had the capital to fund ventures that could save the company,
such as their own Craigslist or Groupon. And I believe they and other news
companies _did_ blow a good chunk of money on failed tech ventures. In
hindsight, they should've continued throwing money at greenfield projects,
since just about any longshot success would've been better than the current
state of things. But it's too easy and reductive to say, "Well the news
industry should've just invented Google/Facebook if it really wanted to
survive".

------
stabbles
For those who care about text only news:

NPR has [http://text.npr.org](http://text.npr.org)

CNN has [http://lite.cnn.io](http://lite.cnn.io)

I've created [http://noslite.nl](http://noslite.nl) for Dutch news

~~~
doomjunky
[http://old.reddit.com](http://old.reddit.com)

[http://i.reddit.com](http://i.reddit.com)

[http://mbasic.facebook.com](http://mbasic.facebook.com)

[http://lite.cnn.com](http://lite.cnn.com)

[http://text.npr.org](http://text.npr.org)

[http://twitter.com](http://twitter.com) (with JS disabled)

[http://m.twitter.com](http://m.twitter.com)

------
burlesona
What a zinger at the end. Point well-made. :)

------
taurath
Not sure that speed is really the factor that matters. That content loads
quickly and would exacerbate that there’s frequently little worthwhile
content. The internet has stretched communication to be a nation and worldwide
thing. Eventually we’ll figure out that local concerns matter more - until
then we’ll have to suffer through some really bad media that doesn’t affect
any of our lives while most of our communities crumble due to lack of
attention.

~~~
jordanpg
Agree. Focusing on web application performance is entirely beside the point.
Most modern news sites are typical modern web applications.

The issue is that the value of the words themselves has changed, both in the
economic sense as well as culturally, not to mention the problem of the
erosion of trust.

------
sdan
Nowadays I can't even go to news websites so I get my news primarily from HN,
Twitter, or Reddit, where news is condensed and I rarely get to see the other
point of view (in other words, good journalism).

Obviously I understand they need to make money, but at the same time most of
the news articles even posted to HN have some limit to reading (even with JS
blocked). Maybe a student pass would be good for students like me. I don't
think I'll have a problem paying for them... but then I'll have to manage each
of these subscription.

It would be nice to have a Netflix for news (to pay for all news subscriptions
in one go).

~~~
anthk
A lot of articles with "mandatory" JS can be read just fine with Lynx/Links.
Better with Links -g.

------
yellow_lead
News is unbearable, but not because of the format. Recognize that reading the
news becomes habit because the news of the day becomes useless fast.

I realize that this is a contradiction from me, a HackerNews reader, but I
feel that part of the reason I come here is for inspiration - on new
technologies, ideas, and new code (show HN). When I refer to news earlier, I'm
talking about the stories and articles you might have found in a newspaper.
They may contain inspiration but IMO are much more clickbaity and only written
to fill space.

~~~
Goladus
Agreed. I cannot stand news from major news sites. Good articles exist on
smaller sites, where there is a legitimate attempt to cover something
interesting in a thorough and well-researched manner (for example today I just
read this: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-
scientist...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-decode-the-brain-scientists-
automate-the-study-of-behavior-20191210/)). But good articles on mainstream
sites are rare. Most of them just make me angry.

It used to be that I was just contemptuous of mainstream news and annoyed by
bias. Apart from basic critical reasoning skills, back in 1998 I took a course
on mass communication and learned a whole host of dirty tricks they use, and
it's just gotten worse sense then. Now it's gotten to the point where it's
maddening to see brazen deceptions promoted by mainstream sites, and just
absolutely sickening and not a little bit terrifying to see this huge push
toward "authoritative" news sources by the likes of YouTube and Facebook.

So, given that there's so little I can do to stop the onslaught of deceptive,
grossly misleading propaganda, I try to ignore it for the sake of my own
emotional health. (That includes Hacker News, which I rarely visit anymore)

------
fallous
The problem with the newspaper/news industry is that the value their audience
places in the product is less than the value that advertisers place on access
to that audience. Additionally the cost to generate and deliver that product
exceeds what the audience is willing to pay and in many cases the value of
that audience is low enough that even advertisers don't offer enough to cover
the costs.

Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the
costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing
press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a
newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the
classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.

------
avenger123
I think is somewhat of a solved problem via PressReader.com or it's variant.
Depending on where you are getting access is free if you have a library card.

Whether using it via browser or dedicated apps, it's as close to reading a
real newspaper as can be. I particularly like the low-noise way of aggregating
comments on articles. If there is comments with an article, a little indicator
with the the number of comments is shown which can be clicked to read or
ignore as desired.

------
DanielBMarkham
Economically, there's something very strange going on with the net today.
Aside from streaming video and perhaps some specialized apps like games, for
the vast majority of people, they're just fine as long as they can move around
a few MBs every day, mostly in text. Even photo sharing doesn't use a huge
amount of data, relatively speaking.

But to get to that paltry amount of data we actually need, we have to sift
through 50, 100 times as much garbage, all of it related to engagement or
advertising.

For people who have transfer caps or end up in "jail" when they use too much
internet, it puts them in a really odd place. We're charging them to pay for
us to do things we want to do, not things they want to do on their own. Then,
when we charge them, if we're lucky we reach our goal: more usage of our site
or the user buying something they normally wouldn't, both of which involve
spending even more money. This seems a bit like the old "heads I win, tails
you lose" joke. There is an illusion of choice, but not really.

~~~
nine_k
The signal-to-noise-ratio looks much like that of email's. 99% of email
traffic is spam. It gets filtered quite successfully in most cases. Still the
penetrating few fractions of a percent make enough money for spammers to
persevere.

I wonder if this could be the endgame state of all add-related tracking, heavy
ads, etc on the web.

------
vermaden
I looked for UNIX/BSD/Linux related news that would be really important, not
just usual bullshit, pointless 'small' things or PR from companies.

... and I failed. I was not able to find one or several such news sources.

The nearest thing that I was able to find was _' In Other BSDs'_ series from
[https://www.dragonflydigest.com/](https://www.dragonflydigest.com/) page, but
it is very limited and small.

In all that I decided to create my own _' Valuable News'_ series, with latest
(weekly) episode available here:
[https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-
news-2019...](https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/valuable-
news-2019-12-16/)

It may sound as shameless self promotion, but I really was not able to find
such news source ...

Regards.

~~~
progval
There's LWN.net

------
fortran77
Or go back to the original form, but delivered digitally: a mix of news,
editorial content, and paid ads, all served from the same server, with no
moving banners, pop ups, sticky headers, third party servers, scroll-alongs,
click-to-read more, etc.

~~~
anthk
This. Small unobstrusive ads, with a custom CSS so they are either for mobile
or PC. No flash, no popus, no moving banners. Just a small square with a
picture/promotion.

------
colinmegill
CNN exists in the form suggested here.

Posted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798835)

~~~
melzarei
> I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news
> website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN.

The article already mentions that.

~~~
anthk
Get an RSS reader.

------
kingludite
From a user perspective: Just stop visiting those websites. The internet echo
chamber will repeat those exact same articles a million times (not kidding)

Until we stop visiting these places their business model works and they are
doing what they should be doing. There might even be an advantage in filtering
out low end machines.

A more constructive idea imho would be to fix it with more sensible
implementation of the circus. Like the article in the link demonstrates you
can append an entire book to an article. You can also progressively load
images and videos for dozens of advertisements without turning the page into a
tragedy of bloat. 20 assets??? More like 200-500!

It isn't that what they want is so ridiculous, it is the way it is
implemented. You should have one analytic implementation producing data used
by all 50 advertisers in stead of each having their own combined with
additional 3rd party ones for each.

Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client where
usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency. They
should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people.

~~~
Goladus
> Advertisement providers should deliver a usable product for their client
> where usable doesn't refer to ease of implementation for the news agency.
> They should make an effort to promote in stead of bothering people.

For what it's worth, this was Adsense back in the 2000s. At a time where
banner ads were characterized by obnoxious "smack the monkey" flash games,
Google's ads were clean, fast-loading, and un-obtrusive. They looked different
enough from normal text to be clearly recognizable as an ad, but otherwise
plain and tasteful.

However the sad truth is that, to some extent, bothering people is the desired
goal of advertisers. Their goal is to get the attention of a customer and if
they annoy some others in the process, it doesn't matter because the one
customer they did get is worth it.

------
manskybook
Safari 13 for MacOS allows you to selectively, or universally, see most news
sites in reader view without having to select each time. Most other browsers
have add-ons that do a similar thing, and Instapaper and Pocket, among others
create text-only versions of most articles.

Most of those also work outside of adblockers, so, even when an adblocker is
detected, the news/text reader displays the article text when the adblocked
page won't (examples include Wired and the Los Angeles Times).

There is probably still some significant overhead in loading and parsing the
original page, but, as some have pointed out, the lag is usually "acceptable"
even on the original page.

There appears to be some added value in using these various strategies in
multiple browsers.

------
3xblah
"I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news
website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN."

How much is the author willing to pay? He is going to subscribe to "every news
site"? That seems like it could get costly. Chances are, he can only afford to
subscribe to a few newspapers. If he provides a list of those sites, maybe
someone would help him get the "text-only" reading experience he wants.

"Text-only" is within the user's control, not the website's. It matters what
software the user chooses to use to retrieve and view the text. If the
software is financed indirectly or directly by ad revenue, then "text-only" is
likely to be more difficult.

This is why the author is complaining. He is using a browser funded directly
or indirectly by advertising. He is therefore at the mercy of the browser
authors and the website operators.

------
dgudkov
Of course news sites know how to create fast, easy-to-read websites. There is
no point in complaining about poor usability and bloated websites, because
it's just a symptom of a decease. The internet in its current state is ill-
equipped for making good journalism a sustainable business. Google and other
search engines are a direct threat to good quality news media. The search
engines took the lion's share of advertisement revenue from news media and
made them starve of cash. They encourage click-baity headlines and shallow
articles, do not protect or poorly protect from stealing/copying content. This
is the real problem.

Bloated websites are horrible, but they are a symptom, not a decease. There is
not point in complaining about symptoms.

The comparison with newspapers is good. This is what news websites would have
looked like if the decease had been cured.

------
lettergram
Maybe news papers should get back to their roots. Embed ads To users who don’t
pay (don’t use google ads, embed them, like they used to working with
companies).

Further offer good coupons based on the users location and offer more coupons
if they register for $3 / month subscription

They should easily be able to make decent money this way.

------
throwaway8291
> Text only.

I have a good experience reading news and blogs via links.

Example:

links -dump "[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-
weal...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/hermit-crabs-wealth-
inequality.html") | less

~~~
scribu
Just tried it now on a few different sites. The content is burried in a lot of
cruft, such as navigation menus, footer links etc.

How do you get rid of that?

~~~
3xblah
"Just tried it now on a few different sites."

Which sites?

------
muzani
I had this same experience quite recently. First thing that popped in my brain
was, "Wow. Paper newspapers have awesome UI," then I realized how ridiculous
that was a few seconds later.

But it is true - they have had decades of experience crafting good headlines.

It's also really clear what the news of the day is. I can't think of a news
site that has "front page news".

All of them today are lists of headline news, and prolonged exposure to
clickbait makes headlines less appealing. It's the main reason I've never done
a paid subscription to one; I just don't know what to read.

I also don't want videos or sound playing. I hate it when an article goes into
a video without text; I'm here to skim something in 15 seconds, not 3 minutes.
I'm glad Firefox blocks autoplay videos.

------
WalterBright
> And if it isn't already clear that news websites are bloated, in order to
> prove it to you, I've embedded A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens on
> this page in its entirety, and you probably didn't even notice.

Ya got me :-) Very clever way to make the point.

~~~
stOneskull
it's got me reading the book. ooh, those nasty royals!

------
msvan
The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough. For most
newspapers, ads are needed to run a profitable digital business. Ads cannot be
removed for paying subscribers, since paying subscribers are precisely who
advertisers want to target. And if you want to display ads on the internet,
you have to track people just like your competitors Google and Facebook do.

> If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of
> valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a
> text-only static version of their website.

I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic
mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order
for quality journalism to exist in the first place.

~~~
itronitron
you do not have to track people in order to display ads on the internet, you
just incorporate the ad on the webpage, and whoever visits the page sees the
ad

~~~
presumably
That sounds an awful lot like how ads in newspapers used to work... you put
the ads in the paper, and whoever reads the paper sees the ads.

So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?

~~~
grmn
Computers cut the ads out of the page with no effort.

~~~
presumably
I don’t understand the relevance of that argument in this context.

Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort
they can cut out anything else from the page.

The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user
to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before
reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used
in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see
people blocking ads online.

~~~
philwelch
Plenty of people block ads because the ads themselves are annoying. People
don’t cut ads out of paper newspapers because it’s more annoying to do that
than it is to just ignore the ads.

------
thomasahle
This is the first time I've noticed that you can no longer grab the scrollbar
in Chrome (on Mac, visible when you scroll).

If I can't drag the scroll bar to the bottom, what other ways are there to
scroll all the way down fast?

(Other than using another browser of course.)

~~~
michaelmrose
\- On a touch screen including a laptop you can scroll with your finger.

\- Space scrolls down several lines.

\- Scroll wheel

\- Up and down arrows scroll down a line at a time.

\- Page up and page down scroll down almost an entire page leaving what was
the bottom-most section previously now the topmost section so that readers
aren't disoriented or lost. Some apps let you configure this overlap size.

\- If you like vim you can add extensions to your browser and use j and k. \-
Home and End keys go to the very top and very end respectively.

\- Windows you can hold down middle mouse and drag to scroll. This isn't
common in linux where people rely on middle mouse paste but is possible to
configure

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-
mouse-m...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-
movements-scroll-when-the-middle-button-is-held-down)

On Mac this is apparently called "smart scroll"

[https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-
mouse...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/64115/enable-mouse-wheel-
autoscroll-feature-in-chrome)

If you just want it on chrome there is an extension

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoscroll/occjjkgifpmdgodlplnacmkejpdionan)

In general however you do it grabbing the scrollbar in chrome is inefficient.
You must grab a smallish UI element on the side of your screen. Your keyboard
and mouse are always at hand.

~~~
anthk
> smallish UI

Scrollbars back in the day were large and thick.

~~~
michaelmrose
Scrollbars are a better visual indication of the ability to scroll than a way
to actuate said scrolling. This is why they are smaller. Even thicker
scrollbars were still a small part of the screen.

------
johnobrien1010
If anyone in the comments can figure out a sustainable business model for news
that doesn't involve bloat-inducing ads or unrealistic expectations of
consumers paying subscription fees, I'll Venmo them (money to buy) a beer.

~~~
lawn
I don't understand why paying for single articles isn't more popular. It's the
same for streaming services: I should be able to pay for that one TV-series I
want to watch, or that one movie that's only available on that one streaming
service I don't have.

~~~
mynameisvlad
I mean, you can do the latter already. You can buy a season or a single
episode of a show on iTunes, Amazon, etc. You can also rent or buy single
movies across many different platforms.

It’s just absurdly expensive compared to a streaming service. This is partly
due to legacy pricing (I don’t think the price of a movie or TV show has gone
down in many years, and all the providers charge the same) but also because
I’m sure a lot of revenue for subscription services comes from people who buy
the subscription but don’t use the service.

------
generalpass
Firefox has solved this problem, at least for me:

    
    
      Ctrl+Alt+R

~~~
sjnair96
Cmd + Shift + R on Safari/MacOS I believe.

------
agumonkey
I forgot which newspaper website it was (some big name) offered me to either
subscribe to see the full presentation or go to the text only version, which I
did.

It was a delight.

ps: not only web based newspapers goal aren't aligned with users, I feel an
unbearable hypocrisy of internet being passed as the disruptive revolution of
the old world when in fact it's exactly the same (text, ads, survival, bias)
but coated in even more fallacies. At least newspapers have a price tag
somewhere.

~~~
nothrabannosir
NPR.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-
women-stopped-coding)

------
kickscondor
> The core of the problem is the fact that the incentives of these companies
> and their users are not aligned at all. Maximizing revenue at all costs is
> every news website's motto.

For further reading, see this one: (I presume this is a classic in HN circles,
not sure) [https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-
bubble/](https://stratechery.com/2015/popping-the-publishing-bubble/)

------
XCSme
I was actually looking at the source-code of the page first to see if it has
any CSS (to my surprise it actually has a stylsheet with only two rules, for
performance reasons it would have been a lot better just to have it directly
in a style tag). Once there I was wondering what's up with all this text and
thought the entire site was a single-page-application where you could read all
his articles :)

~~~
djsumdog
Hmm .. also some google analytics at the bottom.0 under the book

I still use log parsers (awstats and matomo) .. really am just interested in
number of unique/non-crawler visitors and don't care about the rest really.

------
viburnum
OMG this made me laugh so hard.

------
shortformblog
Pointing out that a news site can be faster with less stuff on it is besides
the point. That’s the easy part. Point out a way that news outlets can pay
their bills efficiently with dozens of people on staff—the ones that actually
gather the news to fill your feed. Because if news sites can’t pay for a
staff, they can’t offer their service to the public.

That’s the only way it’s going to work.

------
peterwwillis
Software & data undergo diffusion, such that they will always expand to fill
all available resources. Unless it's designed with very specific limits, it
will always continue to expand. In 10 years we will be filling up terabyte
hard drives on our mobile devices, but a quarter of that will be operating
system/app data/cache.

------
projectileboy
Ads are the monster, but developers are at least partly to blame. Most news
and magazine sites could be served up as single pages, but instead are
implemented as Javascript-heavy single page applications that load 50
different elements asynchronously, because it’s just so much more fun to build
that than it is to write HTML and some CSS.

------
mark_l_watson
The advice to use the text only versions for NPR and CNN is solid advice.

I think news is negative and by and large news organizations serve elite
interests. In the USA this is mostly to make democrats hate republicans and
vice-versa (the slave class, formerly known as the 'middle class', is thus
easier to manipulate and control). Since I like to keep my news ingestion to 5
or 6 minutes a day, I use The Guardian's ([https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news)) free morning email of top stories.
Really a nice service.

Also compared to corporate/elite lacky news sites like MSNBC, Fox News, CNN,
ABC, etc., I find Democracy Now
([https://www.democracynow.org/](https://www.democracynow.org/)) to be a
breath of fresh air.

I contribute to The Guardian and Democracy Now.

~~~
closeparen
Wingnut partisan sources will always be a breath of fresh air to you when
they're on your side. Right wingers feel the same way about Fox.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I think that Amy Goodman on Democracy Now is about the furthest a person could
be from a “wingnut.”

I agree that too many people are overly devoted to either Fox News or MSNBC.
Just my opinion but these two “news” services seem to care most about
fracturing US civil society. We need more acceptance that in fundamental ways
most Democrats and Republicans want the same things: opportunity for their
children and themselves, security of our country, etc. It does not make money
to run news stories that bring people together.

------
kdkirsch
Touché. I agree with you about user fatigue and have already changed news
sites I check for this reason. Also it was very effective and rewarding
demonstration for those of us who read to the end…of the article not the book.

------
louisch
The final point would perhaps be made a bit better if the embed was the same
width as the article. I was wondering why there was horizontal scrolling when
the content fit on screen at first.

------
tonfreed
I wonder if it's even possible in this day and age to run a subscription news
service and still be viable. Are people even willing to pay for good
journalism anymore?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Are people even willing to pay for good journalism anymore?

They never were; subscription prices never paid the bills for most
publications, they just provided “paid circulation” numbers to support
advertising sales, since paying subscribers were an indicator actual
readership as opposed to copies printed that no one actually read.

------
friedman23
The majority of news sites don't even make a profit despite how desperately
they try to monetize every inch of their website.

------
magical_mishka
I dont even bother reading on the actual site anymore. I just save them to
Pocket and read a clean text-only version on it later.

------
sgillen
This was worth the read just to discover text.npr.org. Much better on mobile
than their app for me.

------
CTOSian
with all that shit on the news pages, I use RSS (kriss RSS on a RPi-zero
server) and read the articles on spot, plus -on the RSS ,again- the articles
are clean from ad crap.

------
salutonmundo
noscript makes many news sites more bearable—of course, there are some which
whitewall you—which can sometimes be bypassed with reader view—but sometimes
not :(

------
fishtoaster
> I'm more than ready and willing to pay for a text-only version of every news
> website like the ones provided by NPR and CNN.

This may be true of _you_ individually, but not _you_ statistically. We used
to have more minimalist news sites, but they were outcompeted by sites heavy
with trackers, banners, ads, and all the other cruft we love to hate. This is
largely because, given the option between paywalled quality and free crap,
most consumers end up choosing the latter.

------
dandare
> Maximizing revenue at all costs is every news website's motto

I find this statement truly idiotic. The last time I checked almost all legit
newspapers, that support quality journalism, are financially struggling,
experimenting with paywalls and desperately looking for a business model that
could support real journalism in this "everything is free on the internet"
era.

------
tim333
From the users point of view uBlock origin does a pretty good job with the ads
and [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) for quite a few
paywalls. Of course that leaves the question of how the papers will make a
living.

------
kuroguro
+1 for pun :)

------
spyckie2
I think as a society we are waking up to the fact that we don't like how the
market shapes many, many industries.

We know that the market isn't perfect from Economics 101. Public goods, free
rider problem, and other basic issues show us that market forces and rational
players alone will NOT provide the best outcome for society.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-
rider_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem)

We currently have three systems of distribution in our society - pure
capitalism / globalism, regulated capitalism, and government run programs:

1\. pure capitalism is where there is very little regulation or market
intervention

2\. regulated capitalism is where policies, penalties, or subsidies exist to
shape behavior of companies in ways that market forces wouldn't

3\. government run programs (or other similar programs) receive funding and
try to deliver a service for free or heavily subsidized at cost

There are some markets / areas of consumption that are running well in our
country (that we as a society are happy with the cost and quality of service
provided). These include:

\- Food, clothing, most consumables, physical goods, hobbies / activities,
recreational media, etc.

Some markets that are not running well are:

\- Housing, education, transportation, news media / information dissemination,
health care, etc.

Now, there's 3 ways of affecting change:

1\. Add in policies, penalties, or subsidies to an existing market to enforce
specific behaviors

2\. Reduce or modify policies to revert specific behaviors or combat
inefficiency

3\. Create a sustainable fund / program to allow the service be delivered
without market forces attached

Unsurprisingly, these all require government intervention. It's why most
people are so vested in the political situation of the present, because our
government is the only power that can shape markets and solve these problems.

There is one other route - the public comes together does #3 - creates a fund
/ organization that is meant to provide the good and service without market
forces attached. Now, unfortunately the public lacks a huge factor to
sustainability - the ability to tax. So whereas funds from government can be
sustaining because of taxes, funds from the public have to rely on a large
endowment or other such thing in order to be self sustaining.

Local news, news reporting, and social media currently exist under system #1.
But they need to move to #2 or even #3 if it turns out we really don't like
giving the market what it values - our time on ads and our data for ads. Or
even worse, giving the market the ability to shape our thoughts and public
discourse.

~~~
marcosdumay
> I think as a society we are waking up to the fact that we don't like how the
> market shapes many, many industries.

That's known for at least a century. If you look carefully, it's know in some
form for as long as people has talked about markets.

It wasn't for lack of knowledge that governments abandoned market
intervention. People (as a collective) have some funny ways to form their
opinions, they some times become radicals, moving from one kind of extremism
to another, without stopping for a second to think they may be wrong before
completely changing their opinions into the opposite of what they just were.
If anybody has a good idea why this happen, it would be interesting to listen.

~~~
spyckie2
I think it's because capitalism has a "soft correction" mechanism, which is
consumer activism. Because complaining and boycotting kind of works as a
defense mechanism against market forces, it masks the underlying systemic
problems.

Because of this, many people don't actually know how the market shapes
industries. We have so many activist conversations and so few policy
conversations in public discourse, it reflects what people, even smart people,
think about their ability to affect change.

