lol what do people expect? You say you want a web without ads, now you want a web without paywalls. Sorry, but... pick one. Or watch as the internet collapses.
Exactly, just like I expect to get paid for my work. I want a simple way to pay for all the pay walls in aggregate so I'm not signing up for 27 different subscriptions and I read one article from each source. I'm not against paying, I'm against a huge pile of bullshit management.
No no, that's a monopoly (by HN standards). If anything like that were to exist, in 5 years time the comments section would be full of people clamouring for anti-trust action.
Those hit the same issue, given they are just linking to various sources, each with a paywall.
At least Google News and Artifact lets you block sources and with Artifact it understands paywalls, so stops recommending you posts after a while.
The one thing both of them are missing is the ability add a new source. E.g. if I stumble upon an interesting blog post or newsletter, let me add that blog to the mix, but use the same algorithm to incorporate the post intelligently into the algo feed.
The internet will also collapse when everything has turned into ad-optimized clickbait.
There is no shortage of brilliant people who are happy to share their creative work for free. Remember blogs and RSS? They were great. Static pages don't cost anything to host either.
> Static pages don't cost anything to host either.
Really? Who's hosting static pages for free? Github? Because they certainly still make money, they're just hoping to upsell people. If static sites for Github become a major cost you can bet they'll find a way to subsidize, such as advertising.
Those are far from the only options available. Recently platforms such as patreon have shown that it is completely feasible for a small subset of enthusiastic fans to financially support some creator that makes their content freely available to anyone with an internet connection. And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time, so acting like those people don't exist in spades just because a bunch of rent-seeking content farms have entered the field in recent years is ludicrous.
No, those are not the only options. But the money has to come from somewhere.
> And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time,
Where? Sites like Wordpress or Medium are ad-driven. Or you have to create your own site, which means paying for hosting.
The problem is that paying is almost never anonymous, and there are still many places in the world where consuming the wrong text makes you a quasi-criminal.
Internet content is largely non exclusive and infinitely replicable.
Even the RIAA gave up and embraced the web, if begrudgingly.
Single edition single article news is simply a different type of good/product on the web. When publishers realise this and do what Spotify/QQ have done for pop music, then they'll get the additional revenue they seek.
In a restaurant you have a pretty good idea what you will get, generally.
Also the analogy is flawed because many people will stick to a few different meals they like from a restaurant. This would make no sense at all for information/articles.
A complicating factor: I think the people frustrated with Paywalls are often not browsing the website directly: A friend or relative sends you a link "hey check this out", or someone posts an article on a news aggregator site to spark discussion. You either hold the escape key after a refresh so you can chat with your mom about the article, or cut right to the comments section of the aggregator site and post something insightful based on the title.
Of course it can exist. But say goodbye to random blog posts from people who just want to put their voice out there. They'll need to establish a platform first (probably on some other ad-subsidized platform), get people to pay upfront/ subscribe, and then buy hosting.
I have a feeling there's a but of point-missing going on. The authors are not really getting paid for their work; modern copyright is a get-rich-cheme for rights-holding corporations. (I write 13 books and netted a few hundred for it. All the rest was bagged by the publishers.)
Resisting paywalls is not resisting the idea that the authors should get something for their work. It's resisting an double exploitation structure, where networks monopolize, enshittify, and bleed dry everyone they can get their hands on - authors, readers, advertisers, subjects, everyone.
That this is so is easily shown_ take structures where the actual authors get paidm and people pay voluntarily. Patreon is still a fairly good example for this: people do their work, put it online for free, and people still pay for it (and some bonus content), for the joy of listening to it/watching it/whatever.
I know this was tongue-in-cheek, but I see it as a time investment — or an opportunity cost. If you’ve got gobs of money and just want content now, maybe it’s not worth your time to stay on top of all this subversion technology.
The issue is the paywalls preventing access to information. Information should be available to everybody, regardless of whether or not they have the means to pay for it. Imo, it's best to have paid features that are not expected to be provided for free that helps pay for the free features or if going the advertisement route, make advertisements that are non-obtrusive and don't make the user's experience worse.
