Twitter is already a bit of a special case because porn is so accessible (although, you must opt in through the browser and cannot opt in through the app).
It has a massive user base. And political connections. And lawsuit money. Apple (and Google) will absolutely treat these publishers differently than a random app developer.
Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.
In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid.
Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming.
Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded?
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site.
If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites.
I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e
Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
Honestly, if it wasn't for Musk' ties to Trump, I'm betting they just would have pulled it.
Twitter is already a bit of a special case because porn is so accessible (although, you must opt in through the browser and cannot opt in through the app).
Yeah, reading this my reaction is “so why didn’t they do it?”. A less prominent app would have been fulled first and notified later.
It has a massive user base. And political connections. And lawsuit money. Apple (and Google) will absolutely treat these publishers differently than a random app developer.
Because it makes Android a more attractive option than it otherwise would have been.
So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s sad. It never occurred to me we’d get here.
Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.
In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid.
Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming.
Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
Why is it sad for people to be compensated for their work?
That's not what OP said.
Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls.
Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
The web is still open, anyone can post anything they want and anyone can see it (in the US, at least).
An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.
The original message is,
> So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s lamenting that more is behind paywalls. Not that the paywalls exist.
And sowbug wrote that paywalls and the open web are not compatible, to which I disagreed.
Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded?
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.
This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site.
If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites.
I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.
People demand access to everything.
We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
And CBS might as well be state controlled media and ABC just bribed Trump and very much kowtows to the administration.
Advertisers are moving away from broadcast along with eyeballs.
It costs money to pay journalists.
You get that money through advertising or subscription revenue.
Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock. You couldn't adblock TV or a physical newspaper.
Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. Anyone that isn't the New York Times is struggling.
> It never occurred to me we’d get here.
My parents were journalists. The business model has been broken before I could read.
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
Not mentioned is taxes.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...
And in Australia most of that money went to Murdoch controlled media.