Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are trolling but I gave it a hard look anyway. My cable subscription helps fund several TV news operations and I buy the paper edition of the NY Times frequently.

That is not enough, and point taken. If you have any recommendations for a high quality subscription only journalism operation please tell me.

Where I have changed considerably though is with video entertainment.

In my younger days I used to use bittorrent, and megavideo et al... and rarely pay for movies/tv shows.

Jaron Lanier changed my mind about all of this. I now pay for a lot of movies/tv with my Netflix/Amazon Prime subscription and by renting/buying on iTunes and Amazon.

I even went so far as to create an app to facilitate this. My problem with not pirating movies is that the catalog of these online services are incomplete. You have to search a few, and sometimes a particular title is not available at all.

I built http://streamjoy.tv as an abstraction layer above Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. Search in one place, compare availability and price.

That is how I am putting my coding skills behind my economic philosophy.

When the machines do most of our jobs, my hope is we can still find meaningful, gainful employment in creative projects. In the current economic context the creators need a mechanism to be compensated.

Good on you, that is a good looking site and it fills a niche for people like you and I who pay for content. I really hope there can be a tip system (bitcoin, ripple, paypal, dwolla) that can be a click at the end of a good article. I could imagine dropping $0.25 on 4 good articles a day.

Like TV, video, music, books, if you give the people an extremely convenient way to pay for your content, a good number of them will.

Little known fact, my gf is a journalist, an editor, at a certain publication named after a body of water, who may or may not be in her second week on the job and already embroiled in a bit of controversy. :-o

Well, thank you. I like the site too.

I really hope that everything works out well for your gf, and the Atlantic. I called trading exposure for work a despicable trend because it's happening in so many fields. Its unfair to place all the blame on the Atlantic.

People should go easy on The Atlantic. This new phenomenon needs more society-wide awareness and technologies for micro-payments.

My understanding is that regulations have stymied micro-payments. If that is the case legislation should be adopted to correct this.

Journalism is extremely tough, and has much more of my sympathy. I have total disdain for operations like SXSW that are very profitable and still stiff their talent.

EDIT:

After posting this I thought about how your gf may or may not be embroiled in this controversy. I think the issue of free work/immiseration of the creative class would make a good piece. The Atlantic could acknowledge that it has succumbed to economic (and perhaps social) pressure, do some human interest pieces on people that have been effected, people that have found ways to be viable despite the economic changes, and maybe regulatory reforms that might make micro-payments feasible.

I could see a continuing series on this topic being well received. This issue made it to the top of HN today, I think that validates the market.

I told her she should write about it (I just created this account, she doesn't know I'm commenting on it here) ...

If she had asked him for an interview on the topic (for free obviously) this would've been a non-issue. But she thought she would give him a byline, not knowing of his fame.

He became famous for interviewing pol pot when she was about a year old, and although he is well known in south east asia circles, he's not exactly a household name. The article is freely available now (if you care to read about basketball in NK), she just wanted to offer a wider audience with near zero extra work on his part. With the offer of $100 for a future online effort.

So she asked and got put on blast.

It's interesting how that works. It was a weird way to wake up this morning though.

TO YOUR POINT ON MICROPAYMENTS:

Yes, I think there is a per transaction fee for credit cards. Bitcoin couldn't work flat out because it only supports 350,000 total transactions a day and piddly little tips would eventually crush the blockchain. I think paypal could do it if you just tipped out of your paypal balance. Dwolla.com does do it... but no one has an account.

I have to say I agree with the people who argue people should be doing a lot of this for the love, but love doesn't pay the bills. I really like Stewart Lee's take on it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udqMA4YRQCk

Long listen, but he advocates for a lot of government funding for the arts. Likewise a lot of in the trenches journalism is sponsored by small orgs (pro publica, xyz foundations, etc) The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, etc just chip in a bit extra to publish some of that work.

This specific case was about already written, already available content.

If this was huffpo they would've just thrown quotes around it and put it up with a little link.

/rant

If you want to support/pay for high-end journalism directly, I would suggest looking into Matter: https://www.readmatter.com/

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