Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>This service will combine stories from newspapers, websites, and magazines into a new tab in the Apple News app on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

>Apple plans to charge about $10 a month.

Is it just me, or is there no way this could possibly be worth it? Hacker News and Reddit already combine stories from newspapers and websites, and they do it for free. I have a hard time believing that a managed source selected from a few business partners could possibly be as valuable as a crowd-driven scan across the entire internet.

View on HN

Hacker News and Reddit don't license content from the WSJ, which is why every story has some guy in the comments with a link to outline.com that pirates the article.

So what?

Cal Newport’s new book ‘Digital Minimalism’ offers a good viewpoint on why this is useful: how much time to you lose mindlessly clicking around on HN and Reddit each week? (Unfortunately, I keep track of this and it is disturbing.) With a quality news feed the hope would be that you would get information you need with spending less of your time.

I am taking a different track towards digital minimalism: I don’t count time spend reading eBooks and listening to audio books. But I am monitoring and reducing empty non-productive time on my devices.

What do you use to keep track? I should probably start doing too.

RescueTime is very powerful and can do this.

I wish it was more powerful on my phone and tablet. I love RescueTime

It now works pretty well on iOS devices!

If you're a uMatrix fan, just open up the tool in your favorite browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc) and see what cost you pay for that Reddit service. Hint - it ain't free. You pay in data. Reddit has a horde of remote JS embedded just waiting to read every single little thing you do on the platform

(Not saying Apple also isn't collecting various metrics, but certainly saying that Apple isn't trying to collect every little data point and sell to advertisers, like Reddit. Disclaimer - I <3 reddit)

I lurk Reddit with JS disabled. It used to work perfectly, but recent changes made it so that you have to enable first-party scripts to see all the comments in threads with lots of comments.

Don't forget that most people aren't on HN and Reddit.

Pricetags aren't for do-able vs. not. They're for convenience.

Many people can't and won't learn to use Reddit and dig into the comments section on their iPad (their only daily conduit to the internet).

I'm not sanguine on their future, but I'll wish them luck.

Text based media is not like movies, music, or video games. Especially when that text is at once fungible and quickly expiring.

It could be, $10 a month for news, from a variety of source is a great deal. Back in the real world: There simply isn't going to be sufficient demand. People who will pay $10 per month already pay more for a source they picked.

What possible content can they put in there to attract people that already have newspaper subscriptions?

IIRC It includes access to paywalled articles, at a substantial discount to buying a subscription to each paywall separately.

It does but not the post or the times so pretty bad deal for us news.

I've been using the app a bit since the beta came out. Much of the front page of WaPo and NYT are available without a subscription.

Assuming people actually care that their news comes from NYT and WaPo. I’m not sure that’s the case outside of the chattering classes.

Looking at the lineup they will be killing it in the Fox news demographics which is also heavily skewed towards apple devices anyways.

But for how long? More and more people are blocking ads and more and more sites are putting up paywalls.

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