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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I think that is the feature, and not a bug.

> "Reading daily news is neither motivating or important for me".

Yes, for you. For others its how they stay informed. If it helps, replace "newspapers" with "Bloomberg terminal." It really doesn't matter.

Not to be rude or overly simplistic, but people pay for things they find valuable. You don't find daily news valuable. So its no surprise that you despise a toll booth onto content you don't want. However, that doesn't mean what you don't want/like is bad.

True. That's my absolute personal experience and probably an outlier.

lwn.net has a solution to this. Subscribers can create a link that allows non subscribers to read that one article and at the top it has a promo offering a few months free subscription.

This allows you to posts articles on reddit/hn and people can still click them and when they see how high quality the articles are they will want to subscribe to see them all.

Of course this requires your content to be quality and not just clickbait that gets shared around on social media.

lwn.net's true solution here is that they open up their archives after a very reasonable delay, right up to the beginning of the site. The "share a subscriber link" is a nice marketing gimmick, but far from essential.

>>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?

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).

Exactly. If I could pay for an article I would totally do that. If you paywall an article behind a 20 or 25 cents (the price of a PPC ad) it's very likely that I would pay it. The issue is powering those micro transactions profitably.

If I had to pay a monthly subscription for every link I clicked I would be spending hundreds of $ per month on low quality content.

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