6 ms·

So much of the Internet is pay-walled now. It’s sad. It never occurred to me we’d get here.

by thakoppno 5mo ago

nojito 5mo ago
Why is it sad for people to be compensated for their work?
- sowbug 5mo ago
  That's not what OP said. Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls. Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    The web is still open, anyone can post anything they want and anyone can see it (in the US, at least). An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.
    - rovr138 5mo ago
      The original message is, > So much of the Internet is pay-walled now. It’s lamenting that more is behind paywalls. Not that the paywalls exist.
      - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
        And sowbug wrote that paywalls and the open web are not compatible, to which I disagreed.
  - jimjimjim 5mo ago
    People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.
    - sowbug 5mo ago
      Were you paid to write this comment? If not, then your statement is either true (and therefore slop), or false (because what made the early web awesome was people like you putting their thoughts online... for free).
  - SecretDreams 5mo ago
    Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded? I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nojito 5mo ago
    >they don't scale Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive. >they break the promise of an open web The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.
    - sowbug 5mo ago
      You're excluding the overwhelming majority of websites that were personal sites. Of those, the overwhelming majority are now gone. None ran with a goal of profit or even revenue. They cost so little that their owners were happy to keep them online at their own expense. But they were starved of attention by sites like Facebook and Instagram that used the open web only as one-way onramps to their walled gardens, so they languished and died. I contend, and you may disagree, that the information content of these small sites formed the backbone of the useful web at the time. Sites that began with the question "how can we share what we know?" are what I call the open web. Sites that began with the question "how can we make money from* the web?" are what are killing it. * I don't have a problem with sites that make money on the web. For all its problems, Amazon is a store that operates online. That's wonderful. But Facebook views the open web as a problem, locking a bunch of it behind uncrawlable access controls and pathologically self-serving algorithms. We used to share the public parts of our lives on our personal websites, usually for free as a part of the ISP subscription that we already paid for. Now all that happens on Facebook, and we've paid a multi-trillion-dollar tax for the privilege of doing what we used to do for free.
- Rekindle8090 5mo ago
  Please don't use strawman arguments. It's immature.
pogue 5mo ago
This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site. If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites. I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
- jimjimjim 5mo ago
  Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.
  - etchalon 5mo ago
    People demand access to everything.
    - pogue 5mo ago
      We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s. It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
      - raw_anon_1111 5mo ago
        And CBS might as well be state controlled media and ABC just bribed Trump and very much kowtows to the administration. Advertisers are moving away from broadcast along with eyeballs.
      - jimjimjim 5mo ago
        With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother. Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?
jjmarr 5mo ago
It costs money to pay journalists. You get that money through advertising or subscription revenue. Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock. You couldn't adblock TV or a physical newspaper. Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. Anyone that isn't the New York Times is struggling. > It never occurred to me we’d get here. My parents were journalists. The business model has been broken before I could read.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  > Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays? Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
  - jjmarr 5mo ago
    A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles. They would only assign journalists for important or local content. The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service. It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning. They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore. Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem. The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times. [1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
- TheDong 5mo ago
  Not mentioned is taxes. A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can. Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
janalsncm 5mo ago
Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.
- boxedemp 5mo ago
  In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid. Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming. Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
  - esafak 5mo ago
    But you weren't a journalist trying to earn a living.
    - boxedemp 5mo ago
      No, I was a photographer at the time
  - jarjoura 5mo ago
    So, social media is your news source, same as it is today?
    - boxedemp 5mo ago
      Nope
  - nsonha 5mo ago
    I don't think "not everything is about money" is meant for taking freebies or employing people without paying. Either pay or watch ads, which is it?
    - 5mo ago
lenkite 5mo ago
You can thank AI for the high-gates. It has truly f*ked the web.
- youre-wrong3 5mo ago
  [dead]
- nslsm 5mo ago
  Paywalls have existed for much, much longer than AI.
  - lenkite 5mo ago
    Paywalls have exploded like the Covid pandemic after AI. You can ask any LLM this question and get a truckload of stats confirming this.

So much of the Internet is pay-walled now. It’s sad. It never occurred to me we’d get here.

nojito 5mo ago

Why is it sad for people to be compensated for their work?

sowbug 5mo ago
That's not what OP said. Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls. Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
- lotsofpulp 5mo ago
  The web is still open, anyone can post anything they want and anyone can see it (in the US, at least). An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.
  - rovr138 5mo ago
    The original message is, > So much of the Internet is pay-walled now. It’s lamenting that more is behind paywalls. Not that the paywalls exist.
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      And sowbug wrote that paywalls and the open web are not compatible, to which I disagreed.
- jimjimjim 5mo ago
  People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.
  - sowbug 5mo ago
    Were you paid to write this comment? If not, then your statement is either true (and therefore slop), or false (because what made the early web awesome was people like you putting their thoughts online... for free).
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded? I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- nojito 5mo ago
  >they don't scale Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive. >they break the promise of an open web The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.
  - sowbug 5mo ago
    You're excluding the overwhelming majority of websites that were personal sites. Of those, the overwhelming majority are now gone. None ran with a goal of profit or even revenue. They cost so little that their owners were happy to keep them online at their own expense. But they were starved of attention by sites like Facebook and Instagram that used the open web only as one-way onramps to their walled gardens, so they languished and died. I contend, and you may disagree, that the information content of these small sites formed the backbone of the useful web at the time. Sites that began with the question "how can we share what we know?" are what I call the open web. Sites that began with the question "how can we make money from* the web?" are what are killing it. * I don't have a problem with sites that make money on the web. For all its problems, Amazon is a store that operates online. That's wonderful. But Facebook views the open web as a problem, locking a bunch of it behind uncrawlable access controls and pathologically self-serving algorithms. We used to share the public parts of our lives on our personal websites, usually for free as a part of the ISP subscription that we already paid for. Now all that happens on Facebook, and we've paid a multi-trillion-dollar tax for the privilege of doing what we used to do for free.
Rekindle8090 5mo ago
Please don't use strawman arguments. It's immature.

pogue 5mo ago

This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site. If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites. I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.

jimjimjim 5mo ago
Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.
- etchalon 5mo ago
  People demand access to everything.
  - pogue 5mo ago
    We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s. It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
    - raw_anon_1111 5mo ago
      And CBS might as well be state controlled media and ABC just bribed Trump and very much kowtows to the administration. Advertisers are moving away from broadcast along with eyeballs.
    - jimjimjim 5mo ago
      With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother. Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?

jjmarr 5mo ago

It costs money to pay journalists. You get that money through advertising or subscription revenue. Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock. You couldn't adblock TV or a physical newspaper. Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. Anyone that isn't the New York Times is struggling. > It never occurred to me we’d get here. My parents were journalists. The business model has been broken before I could read.

nozzlegear 5mo ago
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays? Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
- jjmarr 5mo ago
  A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles. They would only assign journalists for important or local content. The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service. It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning. They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore. Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem. The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times. [1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
TheDong 5mo ago
Not mentioned is taxes. A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can. Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.

janalsncm 5mo ago

Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.

boxedemp 5mo ago
In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid. Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming. Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
- esafak 5mo ago
  But you weren't a journalist trying to earn a living.
  - boxedemp 5mo ago
    No, I was a photographer at the time
- jarjoura 5mo ago
  So, social media is your news source, same as it is today?
  - boxedemp 5mo ago
    Nope
- nsonha 5mo ago
  I don't think "not everything is about money" is meant for taking freebies or employing people without paying. Either pay or watch ads, which is it?
  - 5mo ago

lenkite 5mo ago

You can thank AI for the high-gates. It has truly f*ked the web.

youre-wrong3 5mo ago
[dead]
nslsm 5mo ago
Paywalls have existed for much, much longer than AI.
- lenkite 5mo ago
  Paywalls have exploded like the Covid pandemic after AI. You can ask any LLM this question and get a truckload of stats confirming this.