I'm curious about your opposition to paywalls. With journalists losing their jobs, and quality newspapers closing, what would your ideal means of both reading these stories, and funding the production of them, look like?
You've hit on a question that is extremely interesting and quite philosophical. Fundamentally - are professional journalists a good idea or a bad idea? Note that Hacker News is basically volunteer run with a thin layer of corporate control and good moderation, so in principle we might all be happy to live without articles by formal journalists appearing on the site - making do with blogs and suchlike.
It isn't at all obvious that the large centralised news media companies are a good idea; there aren't a lot of them (the Murdoch press owns a big chunk of the public discourse). I'd be happy to see them go mainly on political grounds.
There is a suspicion that the quality of information in news media articles is higher than word of mouth; but that is balanced by the knowledge that a lot of the information is manipulative by inclusion and omission [0]. There is no question that the media edifice supports the major political parties, so the demise of traditional news media might also destabilise the strong two-party-system that exists in America (and practically in my native Australia) by reducing the ability of different political groups to coordinate. People voting on issues that affect them rather than issues that the media think is important could very easily be a net gain.
As the internet became pervasive we discovered as a society how often the news media was just making up stories, and there is a lingering suspicion that most of the important issues aren't actually being covered. I rate the top issue facing society as energy security, and it doesn't get a lot of press in that form (it is tangentially covered under environmental politics).
The clearest negative is we benefit from having a mechanism to communicate political scandals to the voters. I have a lot of faith that an alternative that is as good as a media company exists, but I dunno what it would look like.
> Do you seriously think the thing keeping you from paying for this article is lack of anonymity?
First: I wrote about "a way to do micropayments completely anonymously" which is actually two things:
1. a way to do micropayments (this is currently quite hard)
2. a way to do this anonymoysly
And yes, I find it very alarming that there is no way to pay in the internet really anonymoysly (I come from Germany, where people still love to pay with cash also because cash is hard to track) - this is really an important reason I am rather hesitant to pay in the internet.
e.g. Some poor kid in Kenya googles info that could have life changing impact...and hits a paywall that demands more than he earns in a year.
The internet became great exactly because it's the wild west where crazy things like community driven wikipedia thrive.
It's not that I oppose the whole pay for quality directly (family members are journalists)...but rather that the internet has become a bit of a core pillar of human knowledge & we really can't afford that to end in a maze of corporate walled gardens - it'll crush the thing that makes it great.
>what would your ideal means of both reading these stories,
The internet was fine before paywalls - in fact it grew & thrived. The whole you have to pay or there is no quality content seems quite false to me.
This isn’t how it works though. I was in India recently and i found that NYT or WSJ didn’t have the 10 article limit that I’m usually accustomed to seeing.
>the internet was fine before paywalls
That is because people used to pay for quality content and the internet was just a medium to get more exposure. Now since the internet has matured and there is an abundance of information available for free, people have stopped paying for quality content.
