Comment by bearcobra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bearcobra | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally, I think laws like this miss the mark on what the actual problem facing news publishers is. Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher. On the other hand, allowing users to see a link, headline, and maybe a bit of the opening paragraph are almost certainly a benefit to the publisher, encouraging more users to view the article and potentially generate revenue for them.

But the issue is news is competing with so much other stuff for our attention and consumers don't really care about where it originally comes from. I pay for multiple newspaper subscriptions but a bunch of my social media is "news" but not from a media outlet. It's commentators I like discussing a story. It's my Aunt posting "Can you believe the mayor is so corrupt". It's hacker news threads. I'm getting enough of the information to feel informed without feeling like I need to go pay for the original reporting.

>Obviously Meta/Google shouldn't be allowed to scrape a large portion of an article and display it for users without compensation to the publisher.

AFAIK both companies provide ways of opting out of this. It's that news organizations want their cake and eat it too by forcing google to give them free traffic (via search results) and charge them for the privilege.

The main issue is Canadian politics/news is pretty boring so why would I pay for Globe and Mail or The Star when I can get the main gist from social media? Sometimes your product simply isn't interesting enough to be a big business like it used to be. Propping them up with taxes is just that, propping up something people don't really want. You can never shield them from competition on the internet unless you go full China.

Your point on competition is a good one. I find the news interesting, but watching a TikTok is a much easier way to find out what's going on. Not to mention the competition in my feeds to show me the craziest thing that happened in Australia or Morocco today. It's impossible for a single entity to compare with that. I think a major problem that creates is news becoming more sensationalized than before. I think it's also leading to a lot more misinformation (both intentional and not).

That's led me to think that more public funding of media, including privately owned publications, would be a good thing. Information is valuable even when the market doesn't recognize it, and I think we're becoming worse off as the public relies on institutions less and less. A tax on algorithmic social media & search to pay for it seems like a better plan than laws that just result in news being blocked

> I'm getting enough of the information to feel informed without feeling like I need to go pay for the original reporting.

Then why are you paying for subscriptions?

It's a mix of believing that news has value and I should support that and actually enjoying the product. The NYTimes has done a pretty great job of expanding the scope of the offering to make it really valuable to me. Others like the Globe & Mail or Washington Post or random Substacks have more niche coverage that I enjoy. But there's also plenty of times when I've seen a story and gone "ok got it, not going to subscribe to Bloomberg"

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