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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

The Apple News subscription is basically what you are asking for.

The main problem is that it pays publishers by article view, so it still incentivizes clickbait.

I’d love an alternative where you choose N publications that each run their own feed. Payment would still be done by articles read, but the financial incentive would change to having a good feed instead of having good clickbait headlines.

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I thought of Apple News also. My understanding is you can get access to most of the content from some publishers, but even then discovery is an issue. That is, you can't easily read the WSJ cover-to-cover.

Yes, I'm an Apple News subscriber, and it is the closest thing to what I'm talking about, no doubt because Apple is the only company with enough sway to convince publishers this is in their own interests. But even Apple can't push them nearly far enough. Having to look up the same article in Apple News when I'm paywalled through the web site even though I can legitimately access it is extremely annoying. These publications are definitely not going out of their way to take me to my legitimate, paid-for Apple News copy of their article - and I'm sure that's by design. Secondly, only a subset of publications are available. I want there to be equal access to all articles. But media does not want to compete on a level playing field like that.

> But media does not want to compete on a level playing field like that.

I think they would say they don't want to build in someone else's sandbox.

Then they can make their own sandbox that doesn’t treat their readers badly. But I see no signs of that.

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