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Comment by kimi | Hacker News Reader

Please do not post / upvote paywalled content. I, for one, am sick of it. It has nothing to do with the actual article, but please - no more paywalls on HN.

I have been buying the Economist on paper every week for the last 20 years or so, love it, and I possibly also have the online version, though I never use it. But if the article is meant for public consumption, then let's link it. If it's meant to sell a subscription, please don't.

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given outline.com, seems like that's a viable option for balancing the needs of HN and publishers who hurt-themselves by not allowing new users to see selected popular articles.

(i.e. fool's errand to think anyone will subscribe for a single article, but many publishers aren't setup with sophisticated-enough ways to make selected content free, without exposing themselves to cheats e.g. readers simply using incognito mode or second browsers...)

They're fools to not make all their content free anyway. I'd only pay for a service I use a lot. How am I gonna develop the habit of using your page a lot if every time I open an article of yours I'm blocked? I'll just go to another site, thank you very much.

Do you use an ad blocker? They've gotta pay for content some how either a paywall or ads.

Ad blockers block ad networks. A fancy publisher like Economist doesn't have to use ad networks. They could sell online ads the way they sell print ads.

They can but it's not the way most places want to buy ads online anymore. There's a reason basically everyone moved to using ad networks.

So there are trade-offs involved? Different parties have different interests? Different publishers use different models? That sounds about right, and contradicts the false dichotomy offered above.

The dichotomy is the same people who complain a lot about paywalls on HN are also blocking all ads and JS. Paywalls are the offered alternative to ads already.

You'd like to change the subject, but you haven't. I run uBlock Origin to encourage publishers to run their own non-privacy-violating ads from their own domains, the way they did before the ubiquity of surveillance capitalists. Every time publishers have asked me why I use uBO, I've told them that. That they can't adjust to market conditions, is their own failure of imagination. This impasse won't last forever, anyway. Today's unimaginative publishers will eventually be replaced by new ones with new models we haven't even considered yet.

I think the guardian and wikipedia have a good working model

I don't know much about The Guardian's financials but Wikipedia is only paying for hosting costs and some administrative staff which is easier than a newspaper where you've got to pay staff to write your content rather than having it written for free.

The guardian has all their content free and aggressively asks you to subscribe. Maybe there's more to their finances that I don't know about but they seem to be doing well.

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