Comment by MoronInAHurry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MoronInAHurry | Hacker News Reader

I hate this pervasive attitude that paywalls are some sort of annoyance that sites just "hastily slap on" for no reason. They do it because the subscription is how they make money, so that they can pay people to write all those articles that you want to read.

Thousands of us pay for the subscriptions that enabled those articles to be written, while others complain about how annoying it is that they can't read them too. If you find that there are a lot of articles from a site you want to read but can't because of the paywall, that should be a hint that it's probably worth paying for.

Most of the major sites' subscriptions are very affordable, and they can only continue producing that content because some of us are willing to pay for it. Paywalls seem more common now because the old model of giving everything away for free doesn't work.

The problem I have with paywalls is that I will not subscribe to a random site. Ever. It’s not realistic for me to subscribe to the Times, WSJ, plus all the others. I subscribe to what I subscribe to.

Companies with paywalls will fail. They are failing slowly. The Times is perhaps most successful, but they are still spiraling downwards.

I think smarter companies will be ad supported or Patreon or some other business model that will work.

I don’t begrudge bad companies for trying to hang onto their models. But what’s annoying is when I forget about a paywall and click through to be annoyed.

I would like a feature in HN to filter out those articles because I can’t read them. Circumventing their blocks is possible, but annoying.

If the company produces content that the rest of HN feels is quality content... maybe you should subscribe if you're interested in consuming the content?

You don't have to, but it's either that or perpetuate ad networks that spread malware.

I’m not interested enough to subscribe. It’s cool that others find it valuable enough to subscribe.

But I think there are fewer and fewer willing each year, so they’ll die out.

It reminds me of the record companies in 2000 who talked about value and whatnot while they all died off. It’s cool that people liked paying, but the writing was on the wall.

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