Only the #fediverse could come up with the idea that journalists wanting to get paid for their work and putting up paywalls is the actual threat to democracy.
People always paid for #news. That was central to the entire concept. We would get a newspaper delivered to all of our houses every morning and would (sometimes) read it. Then we all collectively stopped doing that because it being on the internet convinced us that the cost of the news was the paper that news was printed on.
So don’t blame journalism for the lack of information in the upcoming election. The American people didn’t feel it was worth paying for and this is the result. We got spoiled and decided news was free even though we didn’t fund it.
Because it does read as a misnomer, because it's literally saying in the headline that paywalls are bad, but then is paywalled itself — critique something whilst directly using/benefiting from it could be seen as ironic or something.
@matdevdug like I'm not against paywalls on big editorial pieces, or pieces expensive to write, but on an op-ed about paywalls it comes across a bit weird.
Journalists of course deserve to be financially compensated for their work, it's just that that specific article isn't a great candidate for a paywall because of its subject matter.
@thisismissem Not specifically that although that’s certainly the most extreme example. It’s something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately not just on Mastodon but other tech websites. Sort of “if people could read the news we wouldn’t be in this mess” narrative.
@matdevdug I mean, some of those complaints aren't exactly wrong.. the more right wing outlets typically don't have paywalls, where as left leaning do, so folks end up being exposed to more right leaning content — perhaps there's a balance to be made here and we're just off kilter atm.
@thisismissem@matdevdug the majority of paywalls can be bypassed by just feeding the URL to Internet Wayback, so it's not like they are really that much of a "wall"
@asjmcguire@thisismissem That's sort of the "grabbing the newspaper machine door before it closes and stealing a copy" solution. It's true but it's also clearly not the intense of the person who provided the content.
@matdevdug@thisismissem the problem with paywalls in general though, is they want a subscription - to read one article. If they had an option to pay to read JUST the article, rather than to subscribe to the entire newspaper - which you may not normally read, they might do better. Feeding the URL to Wayback, is the equivalent of picking up the newspaper someone has abandoned on a train.
@asjmcguire@thisismissem Well I think your issue there would be sort of the nature of online payments. The price you would need to charge to make it worthwhile to provide access to one page is probably higher than most people would be willing to pay.
You lose like $.30 + 2.9% of the transaction to processing fees. Then you’d have to account for fraud, carding, refunds, chargebacks and maybe VAT although idk about how that works with news.
Like you aren’t wrong at all but I suspect nobody would be willing to pay the Atlantic $2 an article.
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