Maybe pick 1 or 2 newspapers you consider to be truthful to actually get a subscriptions for, besides using this addon.
I get it, there are newspapers out there you really don't check out that often, and they have no free articles per month or "purchase this article", and paying 20 dollars for a subscription for 2 articles a month at 10 different newspapers is a little much. But the more people don't pay for news, the more clickbaity and hyped up journalism will be.
This. Some of the news paper sites mentioned in the list do a good reporting and I subscribe to a few. Quality reporting is not cheap or easy and takes efforts. Let’s pay for quality else we would be left with click-bait, as supported and no information content news.
It seems like the current model isn't working too well. The more outlets clickbait the more they damage their brand. And people get a lot of news through Reddit and Twitter these days completely bypassing news outlets.
Where do you think the well informed people on Reddit and Twitter get their info? I'm being slightly facetious, and there's obviously independent reporting and direct witnesses to events online. But you take away the journalism organizations at the core of the system and then the influencers on twitter on reddit have nothing to inform their hot takes.
I don't know why people still think that. NYTimes is basically back to their glory days of revenue and profit, the FT is doing extremely well, etc etc.
Non paywalled news outlets will be clickbait - they are 100% dependent on advertising revenue and need to get clicks. Paywalled sites generally aren't.
Because while the "top-tier" media outlets are doing extremely well (NYTimes, WSJ, FT, etc.), everyone else is suffering. Huge numbers of media outlets have closed over the past 20 years and there are now far fewer journalists in the United States. Local newspapers that haven't closed are often operating a skeleton crew. And this trend has consequences: numerous studies have linked the decline of small, single-subject and local journalism to increases in political polarization and local corruption. (I worked at Harvard's Shorenstein Center which did much of the research.)
Is there a service in the same vein as music streaming, but for news outlets? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription somewhere at a reasonable price, but not happy to pay for and manage 150+ individual subscriptions (like what this tool provides). Granted I wouldn't ever actually sign up for most of them, but managing even more than a couple would be rather undesirable. Perhaps something with pay-per-view built in, given how infrequently I come across articles from certain publishers?
Apple News does this. Tons of magazines across the spectrum and number of larger US newspapers. If you aren't in the US or at least wanting to read in English, I don't know.
In fact in France quite a few major French, local and some international newspapers + tech + science + entertainment + + + magazines are free online with a library registration. The service is called Cafeyn, and you could bookmark, print or save as pdf pages of all publications available.
In general HN doesn't like apple's approach to news aggregating (i.e. a closed app rather than a 'super account' that works on native websites or an RSS-type feed) but +1
I wouldn't rely on their aggregation. But, with a subscription, you can just read the magazines in the same format and layout as they are printed. No aggregation to get in the way.
As I recall it was a pay-per-article model (around 25 cents per article looks like) and it had a number of publications to choose from. Though I haven't used it lately, I like the idea.
Doesn't that get you back to the problem of click bait? If newspapers are only paid for articles with headlines that grab your attention, then that's where their incentives will drive them. Part of the attraction for newspapers for me is that you're sort of forced to read the other articles as well.
I feel like I'm getting old. The youth ethos of "information should be free!" has been replaced with the reaction "gee, I really hope great journalism can make money, otherwise we won't have any".
Back in the day, the newsstand price for a newspaper, if you got it at the newsstand everyday of the week, was maybe $10-$11 a month. But you could get a subscription for less. You could also read the front page right there at the newsstand without paying anything. You could walk into just about any office building, especially any business with waiting room (like a doctor), and find the daily paper there to read for free. If you didn't want to pay for the paper then you could always find one - just ask someone that read theirs already. Back in the day news was plenty available for free, you just had to know where to look or ask.
Now there is no such thing as a free look. No one has a paper they already read to share. I'm all for paying for subscriptions but that alone does not bring the balance the world once had. Just try to figure out what say the LA Times will charge you after the 'introductory period' - and they won't tell you up front that you have to call to cancel and that the call will take like 30 minutes while they try to retain your business (after jacking up the price by many times after the intro period). And you probably cannot choose the length of your subscription, subscriptions now go on in perpetuity until you complete the onerous cancellation process. I have no love for the way modern news charges for its product and treats its customers. You can blame the internet and cheap people but that isn't the whole story.
Not doing both = money left on the table. Game theory says they will as long as they can, as in the extra $ outweighs the subscriber loss. It’s terrible that the brand damage isn’t weighted more heavily and the calculations seem to be so short-sighted, but that’s where we are I guess.
I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft.
I can understand justifying ad-blocking, arguing that you don't want to see it. So even though you're depriving them of revenue while consuming the product funded by it, there's at least an argument that you're only controlling what you see.
But using tricks to get access to something not available to you without paying? This seems akin to sneaking into a movie theatre.
This isn't the equivalent of avoiding looking at something (your choice), it's the equivalent of breaking into a private business and pinching the products without paying.
(Cue the usual argument about IP, tangibles vs intangibles, and various dismissive remarks arising from cognitive dissonance)
I think you’re engaging in some cognitive dissonance yourself to justify ad-blocking. The situation really isn’t any different. The ads are what pay for the product, so if you purposefully block all the ads, you’re not paying for the content you’re reading.
It’s up to you whether to pay attention to the ads, but outright blocking them is exactly the same as blocking the “please subscribe” wall.
There is at least one other reason for adblocking: ads - even those on reputable sites - have been used to spread malware. Blocking ads thus is like using a condom, where your partner has insta-sex with hundreds of others the moment you get undressed.
Not "it is better", but "you'd be insane not to".
Secondly, I've never ever heard of a case where the site showing the malvertisements offered any sort of compensation to their victims. If that's how sites like to see the ads, all profits to them and zero responsibility, I see absolutely zero problems with adblocking.
Ad-blocking can be justified as the digital equivalent of averting your gaze, although I agree that's a bit tenuous as it's preventing the ad from rendering in the first place. It's marginal. But by analogy, it's like putting your TV on mute when the ads are playing - the producer made the show freely available expecting ad consumption.
But using a tool to get past a paywall is different. The show is not on TV, it is more like a rental without ads - and this tool is used to pick the lock to the rental store and then take all the rentals you want without paying.
I guess I agree that blocking the ads is worse than averting your gaze, actually. It prevents the producer ever getting revenue. But at least that's a risk they knowingly take with that funding model - paywall aversion is clearly not.
> But by analogy, it's like putting your TV on mute when the ads are playing - the producer made the show freely available expecting ad consumption.
The difference is that you need to actively mute your TV every time! You're probably not going to do it for every commercial break, and even if you do, you'll likely catch at least a bit of the first ad. It's really that first ad's fault for not grabbing your attention quickly enough while it had the chance.
Put another way, the advertiser is paying for ad space, and it's the advertiser's responsibility to use that space in a way which catches your attention. Whether the advertiser succeeds or fails is nobody else's problem. An adblocker, however, completely removes the ad space.
TIVO has had the ability to skip ads for about 20 years now IIRC. I have a bandwidth cap on Comcast and don’t want ads to count, however insignificantly, against that. I also don’t trust JS and companies from ad networks to respect my privacy or keep data they collect about me safe. I’d rather (and I do) just black hole route all their junk from known ad networks on a DNS level and let ublock handle anything that does manage to sneak through. If they’re going to go through the trouble of making that not work, they’re probably not worth my time visiting.
> TIVO has had the ability to skip ads for about 20 years now IIRC.
Does TIVO skip automatically, though? I know that when Dish tried to do that in 2015, the TV networks sued. Don't remember who won, but I'd personally be somewhat sympathetic to the TV networks.
---
It's not about you. Websites are selling a product for a price; you're jumping the turnstile and saying it's okay because the fare was too high anyway. By all means, don't visit websites with overly intrusive ads, let the the price and demand curves even themselves out.
Or, if you do block ads—because I get it, the world is imperfect—at least acknowledge that what you're doing isn't entirely ethical or fair, and stop encouraging others to do the same.
This is usually a topic I try to avoid on HN because it feels like such a loosing battle, but somehow I walked into this one. :)
My understanding of the tool is that it actually _is_ the equivalent of avoiding looking at something. The browser either has been delivered the content already or has access to the content, but it's wrapped in an advertisement to subscribe instead of an advertisement for some third party. Looks like it uses the same mechanisms that tools like uBlock use.
Similarly, I avoid looking at the advertisements bundled in my USPS mail (which are often advertising subscriptions).
This is what I meant - this is a technical justification that dodges the point.
How the info is rendered isn't really important to my claim - that it is fully intended to be restricted unless you pay, and you wouldn't be able to see it without employing this trick.
The trick is expressly designed to get you around a "paywall".
This is retroactive justification for sneaking past the security guard when he's looking the other way, and helping yourself to the products without paying. It's just fancy theft.
(By contrast, not looking at mail advertising is just averting your gaze, and ad-blocking is reasonably comparable. But using a tool to get past a locked door is not analogous at all.)
I hope this won't fly in any sane court. If these articles are meant for customers only, then it's on the news company to use reasonable authentication and authorization of their customers.
The practice discussed here is more like the scam where they forcibly put a "good" in hands of a prospect, saying it's a gift, and then demanding a payment.
It’s the same age-old piracy problem that Spotify, Netflix, Apple Music, Disney+, etc have mostly solved. Make a product worth paying for and more convenient than piracy and people will pay a reasonable price for it. Shove ads down peoples throats and play games with hard-to-cancel subscriptions / BS pricing and people will correctly value your product near worthless and act accordingly. It’s up to you as a company to prove your value to users. Throwing up a paywall that is easy to defeat protecting content that isn’t worth much in the first place and is riddled with ads is a great way of telling consumers that they shouldn’t trust you.
>but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft
It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on.
If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permission, you're stealing.
You have been awarded 8 good boy points by the Ministry of Intellectual Property. Please collect your prize at the Ministry of Love.
Bypassing a HTML element is not 'stealing', its reformatting remote data. They are sending the article in the reply to the request, and messing with the formatting. If they did not want you to read the full text, they would not allow an unauthenticated users to access the text.
I always find it hilarious how the strong IP bullies like to reinforce the status quo, empowering the powerful and cursing the weak.
Property rights in particular protect small and independent creators who rely on the fact that people pay for their products. Large studious can generally eat the losses of piracy, independent developers cannot.
This is why today they're forced to either two things. Build proprietary products that make theft impossible, or live on donations and capture only a fraction of they value they produce.
There is only one digital property rights regime I can get behind -- Bitcoin.
It is opt in, and based on a software enforced consensus independent of States and Governments.
Everything else is coercion. I do not subscribe to your flavor of authoritarian strong IP.
Revenue for the service obviously. If everyone acted like the people in question and nobody paid for the service it could not sustain itself, so paying customers effectively subsidize free riders.
Well, the publisher paid people for their writing (or content), and then hosts it for revenue.
The publisher didn't pay them in order to give it away for free.
If you start using digital lockpicks to pick their digital lock, and consume their content without paying, they have lost the revenue haven't they?
(Cue "they're not entitled to revenue for intangible goods", and other libertarian arguments that are internally cohesive but not accepted by the public)
Internal matters are just that, internal matters. You cannot enforce information transfer controls (without prior agreement with that person) because you allegedly paid someone to produce data, and want to make money off of it.
I don’t think this extension receives additional data that the publisher did not willingly provide. Besides I am pretty sure many others would be willing to offer said resources for free (if it wasn't for “good” guys with assault rifles showing up to enforce information and knowledge transfer controlls)
I used to pirate a lot of video games when I was young. Steam ( later epic ) entered India and started regional pricing and now I have pretty big collection on steam and epic ( free games )
Same thing with Movies and music. I made a huge offline collection worth 2-3TBs before I just had to throw it all away because everything was available on spotify, Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, Amazon Prime. Their services are top-notch and most importantly affordable.
I think something similar must be done to the online article/news market to make people want to pay them for easier and affordable access. Until then I will use every extension the internet has to provide to read any article I wanna read.
> “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
I subscribed to the New York Times once and it's nearly impossible to cancel. You have to call up a phone line and from memory, it takes ages. Given that, I would never subscribe again, even though I've considered it.
As such, I "pirate" New York Times articles because the service sucked, not because the price was an issue.
I know this is rhetorical but yeah; retention games. I’m guessing that many of these places do weigh the brand reputation hit of doing stuff like this but just don’t think it’s that important or valuable. I do. I don’t support companies that play these games, which makes it extra upsetting that I literally do not have a competitive choice vs Comcast for home internet. I can get 768K DSL through ATT, or 1300/45 from Comcast. They’re about the same price. No FTTH, no Sonic, wireless options are under 50mbit down, etc.
Looks like this has site-specific rules for setting referrer, clearing cookies, blocking external scripts, and removing modals.
And the add-on embeds Google Analytics.
I wonder if some of those ad-hoc setTimeout(removeModal, 500) could be made more robust by looking for modals with MutationObserver. That way you can remove things the second they activate instead of letting them flash / hoping they exist once your timeout fires.
Looking through my history I've tried & failed irishtimes.com and wsj.com. It might be a short list, but it's every site I've tried, so you can imagine 2 for 2 is starting to leave an impression.
Makes sense. In my experience wsj has one of the strictest paywalls, nothing works. These workarounds do things like impersonate Google. Most news orgs think the vulnerability is worth being fully indexed, whereas wsj would rather have Google only index their intro.
Broadly speaking these workarounds are for websites that sometimes show you the full story (i.e. based on a cookie or your referer).
I'm not sure it crosses the line. Most of these websites have the text in the HTML, but hidden to the user. This is so Google can index and send traffic based on search. If the HTML is sent to the client, accessing it is not piracy.
Just because there’s a technical workaround doesn’t make it not stealing. If I neglect to lock my car and my stuff gets stolen, it’s still stealing. I might have been able to prevent it had I locked the car, but it’s still stealing.
If a webserver sent me an exact copy of your car but encased in ice, and I used an ice pick to carve it out, you would still have your car, and i would have a copy of your car. That the web server wants to me buy a flame thrower to melt the ice is irrelivent.
Stealing does not apply to digital goods. You cannot deprive anyone of something infinitely replicable. You can only prevent those that you do not deem worthy to access it. and that attitude makes a person a bad person.
So if I break in to Microsoft, stick a USB in their computers, and steal the source code for Windows, it's not stealing because it's just digital information that's infinitely reproducible? Keep in mind: nothing physical was stolen.
People lose their jobs because they are digital content creators and the attitude is that paying for intellectual property is uncool.
Do you think that people should be required to view websites as delivered, without modifying them in any way? That would be the logical end of attempting to prevent this kind of "stealing".
If there is another term you'd like to use for "looks like theft, but the original owner loses nothing" then feel free. But it is not theft or stealing, those require also depriving the rightful owner of the stolen property.
If I could duplicate the exact contents of your car, would it still be "stealing" if I did so? Reminder that you would continue to be in possession of 100% of the contents of your car. Maybe with regards to any digital data on any duplicated devices, I could see a bit of the "stealing" logic, then again nothing was actually "stolen" from you if you still have 100% of your original property, but I now also have duplicates of that property.
If I walk in to a record store and buy a CD, I'm not just paying for the paper and plastic that it's made of. I'm paying the record company, the record store, and the artist for their time and talent.
With a digital goods, we can eliminate the paper and plastic. It's a great thing! But for some reason, we've also decided to write the artist out of the equation too. At least if you're a pirate.
If you're a software engineer, you're being paid not to manufacture hard goods but to create something of intellectual value that could be technically be duplicated forever. What's the difference between pirating music and stealing code that is under a software license?
So are you against torrenting copyrighted digital goods then? Because people do exactly that. They steal intellectual property and distribute it for other people to use.
Stealing for personal use may be a more minor thing, but it still boggles me that people want to consume the fruits of others' labor without compensating them in anyway, as if creators are slaves who exist only to please.
I made no claim about the relative morality of piracy vs. license violations.
But I will note that you are (by using the framing of "stealing") implying that piracy results in lost sales, which is largely not the case, except possibly for the most popular works. See "Piracy is Progressive Taxation":
If a publisher or author doesn't mind, as is the case with the article you linked, that's fantastic. O'reilly is a good business. But it's still stealing. I think if you have the money, you should pay for the product. It's one thing for a teenager to download a bunch of songs on Kazaa in 2000. But I don't understand why so many self respecting adult knowledge workers feel the need to pirate things they can afford just because they can. Seems entitled and disrespectful to me.
The whole publishing business is effectively a service of providing content created by the author to final users. And because of the uneven power of authors and publishers, the latter is able to grab almost 100% of the price paid by people. Music labels are used to pay artists after long lawsuits. These are the best cases. Scientific publishers do more: they require payments from authors too and don't pay reviewers.
In all cases, the price paid by the user is split in proportion which clearly shows that saying that "pirating" means stealing money from authors is utterly false. I have nothing against paying for books the amount really passed to authors plus some additional fair amount based on the true cost of distribution (eg. printing and transport or electronic storing and transfer) plus a modest profit. However, it is not the case nowadays.
Similarly, I would accept payments for articles in a model where the price for a good article wouldn't cover the costs of many worthless ones. The current model - subscription - is attempting to hide real costs of production of articles of very different value under average price forcing readers to purchase wholesale products. Why should one pay for "fillers" the same money as for good content?
All good points for reforming the business, but none justify stealing the content, in my view. Voting with the wallet is about abstaining, not stealing.
For better or for worse, subscriptions are king in 2022, and I don’t see a meta-subscription for news being a good thing for journalism itself. Personally, I prefer something closer to the iTunes model, but that’s dead. I’m growing entirely sick of singular platforms that hold all the cards of entirely industries (and they don’t pay any better than the publishers do).
By this definition, ad-blocking is stealing. Is using a technical workaround to hid HTML ok but using it reveal hidden HTML is not?
Your car example is not a good analogy. Once you notice people stealing, you would make sure the door is locked. Just like these websites can restrict the content server-side.
This is something broken with the internet. That website need a strong ranking on google search to stay afloat is a symptom of a much larger problem with how the internet operates in this day and age.
At the end of the day you are stealing and looting not just from the company, but the everyday people who work for that company, who are just trying to make a living for themselves and their families, and no rationalization will change that.
And to the car analogy: Let's say I was stolen from, but I'm so lazy I still can't be bothered to lock my car. Or I leave it open for some other reason. This has zero effect on the morality of the thief stealing from my car. It just means I'm an easy target for stealing. Two completely separate things.
I'm not quite understanding the logic here. Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it? Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index?
> Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it?
They didn't provide access to just another customer or Google -- they send the article text to EVERYONE in the HTML response. They are thus making that text publicly available. If they want to make content only available to certain individuals, that is literally what paywalls and authentication/authorization are for.
Instead, they want Google to index the site AS IF the content is publicly available but then use javascript to restrict that content from users client-side on a case by case basis. The golden rule of authorization is never rely on client-side authorization as by then you've already willingly given the data/information to the client.
And the client has no obligation to not look at that information/data. They didn't do anything nefarious to get it -- you literally gave it to them.
> Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index?
Absolutely I would. If we could enhance the indexing and search engine system so that (a) I could tell google which services I subscribe to and (b) google knows which articles are behind paywalls, then we could have a world in which we could intentionally filter To or Away from paywall content.
I know that I would often filter TO paywall content, especially if:
- I could also tell google to avoid content farm content via a filter or content full of ads (not in their interests currently but it might become so as more of us get frustrated with shittier and shittier search results)
- If google could surface the price to access each article on the search results (wherein articles on sites I already pay/subscribe to would be free and articles on sites with individual pay per access would be transparent and upfront).
I hear you and I understand the technical aspects of it but I think you're making the false assumption that Google indexing == content is public. That may be the user expectation, but that doesn't mean it's true. Am I off base here?
I'm having a hard time envisioning a scenario where giving Google exclusive data will be in any way good for content creators and site owners in the long term.
If we took it a step further and gave google private direct feeds from publishers, would you then be OK with the automatic moat around Google's services that would then be built? How about the one that formed from the private subscription data that you needed to feed to them for them to tailor their searches to your preferences? What if they started charging for search? Would you then go to another search engine that did not have the private content feeds and could not, by design, find those relevant paywalled results?
edit: Just to reiterate, I'm not defending the paywall practice (or breaking it, for that matter). I just see this practice pushing paywalls to be hard rather than soft.
In a way these publishers are abusing a public service (search engines) to get a higher ranking, giving the illusion of publicly available content, but then breaking the promise. In practice for their personal private gain they are damaging the system for everyone else, which is much worse imho.
There aren't making it publicly available. If they made it publicly available there would be no paywall. It just so happens that people can utilize some code to bypass the paywall.
This is a false analogy for several reasons:
1. If, in your example, "but she was wearing a low cut top" was used as a justification by someone to physically sexually assault someone, then obviously that is wrong as we've established that rights to one's body belong to the person with said body and you need their consent. If on the other hand, you are simply looking at someone who is dressed provocatively, then while crass, that definitely is not and should not be illegal. In a public space, we each have a right to look wherever we please. We can be judged for where we look (and people should be judged for oogling at someone), but it shouldn't be illegal. There is no right to privacy in a public space for very good reasons.
2. But even if you meant it with the later case (the oogling), there is a huge difference in this case from a moral perspective, namely these are companies who are selling/monetizing their content. Thus, (a) they want you to look at their content and (b) they are ok with you paying to do so. So then your example would be much more akin to an art gallery putting their art on the public sidewalk to entice people to come in and see the art -- only to find that the people are happy to look at the free art on the sidewalk and never pay the entrance fee. No theft happened in that case. The art gallery simply had a flawed economic model where they gave away their product and then were angry no one paid for it.
If you put something in the public sphere, it is public. Simple as that. You have no right to turn your intention of how I "ought" to consume your product into forcing me to do so if you have given me your product for free.
Use a paywall, Use proper authorization.
I solely use firefox for getting around paywalls. I have it automatically clear all cookies upon exit. That way any website that gives a few free articles per month will always be free for me.
From an economics perspective, they are trying to using old school pricing tricks (e.g. bundling, price discrimination, variable unit pricing to enable 2 article users == free, 10 articles == paid) as a tool for managing their customer funnel. But the golden rule of price discrimination is it only works if you can actually prevent your customers from engaging in arbitrage and can keep them in their bucket. A store can have a policy like "limit 1 per customer" but that doesn't prevent me from getting 100 of my friends from buying the thing. If I want to clear my cookies and look like some anonymous new customer each time, there is absolutely nothing illegal OR immoral about that. That's capitalism and they have designed a pricing model that can be gamed.
> A store can have a policy like "limit 1 per customer" but that doesn't prevent me from getting 100 of my friends from buying the thing.
Sure, and if there's urban chaos, there's nothing preventing me from looting a store. Or sneaking stuff in my backpack. It's still stealing.
As to your example about the art, it's more like if one piece of art is in the window, but the rest of the gallery you can only see if you buy the ticket. But there's a door in the alley you can sneak in to and nobody will notice. So you sneak in the back, avoid paying the price, and get to see the whole thing for free. That doesn't sit right with me ethically.
Many of these paywalls simply have either the full body in the response or will return it if you ask with the right user agent (e.g. the one that google uses). These plugins then either remove some overlays or impersonate the google bot.
So, piracy turned out to be a great thing for games (Steam), movies (Netflix), and music (Spotify). It just hasn't happened at scale to the news world yet.
I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are?
I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are.
These sorts of "news piracy" apps will force change for the good of all parties. But they need one more piece to really take off: social P2P sharing. Strip articles of ads, share them in a p2p protocol (which could also develop interest graph capabilities), add voting, maybe comments, and definitely include the article's pictures.
1 - it would be fantastic as a reader
2 - the entire news industry that is stuck in 1995 would be forced to adopt to a Spotify model or adopt the microtransactions that have been promised since the 90's.
I would love to subscribe to a single source for all news. I'd pay a hefty fee. I'd also be happy to pay $0.10 an article. (I'd learn to avoid sites that shill clickbait, too.)
This whole industry sucks for readers. I support anything that gets them to adapt to change and become more consumer friendly.
Both Netflix and Spotify start at $10/month which is $120 per year. $50/yr is ~$4/month for 20 news sites, which seems to be a better deal. What am I missing, is the price still too high or is the number of news sites too low?
I definitely read news from at least 20 different sources each year, without going around paywalls, and I pay for the one I enjoy the most - NYT. (I personally read ~150 articles a year, so that's 33 cents per article, which many readers of HN would earn in 10-30 seconds of work. But maybe I read excessive news). If I really just want to read 1 article per month, I'm often accommodated by some "N free articles per month" policies.
I agree they may be pursuing a suboptimal strategy somehow. Not sure I would call it "absurd". Having 100k individuals producing music on Spotify might be great, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for getting my news that way. But if someone wants to start "Spotify for News", I'm interested. Not sure that NYT needs their paywalls worked around in order for that to happen though.
You bring up an interesting point that they offer it for free to search engines. Didn't it used to be against the rules of most search engines to "cloak" your content by serving one thing to the spiders and another to the general public?
Judging from the current sentiment around piracy among younger generations, I've concluded that MPAA/RIAA propaganda against piracy has been a rousing success.
My philosophy has always been: Pay for things if you are able, it's convenient, and pricing is fair. And if piracy is easier than paying, piracy always wins.
It's the reason I buy all my video games now and rarely pirate music anymore, but half of my TV and movies come through my seedbox.
This. They convinced the kids that piracy is bad and evil, and the Big IP lobby is laughing all the way to bank. Ensuring that you own nothing, and will rent your life from them in perpetuity.
Exactly. If the only way I can get 4k movies and shows without a stream degrading and being able to use mpv or other such video players is through piracy, then so be it.
I'm in a similar position. I use Spotify for music, but for movies/TV, I pirate everything despite paying for multiple streaming services.
It's about being able to consume media on my own terms. Thanks to piracy, I can get the same quality content from another source and enjoy it however I want, on any device, online or offline.
The value of basically all online news articles to me right now is $0. So I'm very comfortable paying that for them. Being able to find a link to an article I might be interested in offers some value (and I would pay more for better screening, see below). But being able to browse the actual content is basically worthless, sorry.
In fact, I generally don't even go to a site if there is a modal popup that makes me accept cookies (occasionally I have if I'm curious enough) and I have literally never signed up, even if free, to get access to an article.
Bypassing paywalls lets me pay what articles are worth to me to continue to browse them.
I do pay for an article aggregation service (academic articles), and I do pay for substack newsletters (although this is in part to support work I think is good even if I wouldn't pay for every article).
Hiding the news behind paywalls means only people with money get to be well informed. Is this not "hacker" news? Seems like a lot of well-paid people forgot where they came from.
I love this extension. It works very well. I use it to browse 20-30 different sites a month. It would cost hundreds of dollars to individually subscribe to each publication.
You want people to pay for everything? Go "disrupt" the industry and create a spotify for news.
> We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.
And all your browsing data is transferred to sites like Outbrain etc., quite the list, actually. I get it, a lot of work, and you don't work for free. I'd rather pay a nominal amount rather than the tracking.
How does this work on a high level? If the server never sends the content, how can a client-side extension get it? Do most website just hide this on the frontend?
Lot of different tricks. One example: just by using a Google Bot user agent some websites will let you access the full content. Sometimes working with some cookies, blocking some particular 3rd party JavaScript libs, some other are more complicated.
It removes the popup elements that cover the page and other little tricks.
The common key thing across all of them, though - the server is sending the content, and then a little JS payload that creates the popup asking you to pay.
It's not a particularly good way of protecting the content of the article, for obvious reasons.
You're targeting non-deterministic classnames in some of these:
paywall-container__1UgCE
That hash at the end of the name is subject to change, making the code brittle. Compounded by the fact that a lot of paywalled content is truncated at the server level now, CSS overrides aren't always enough. The days of "press Esc before the JS kicks in!" are quickly waning.
I thought this would check for the article on archive.org or something.
I will never understand people complaining about paywalls. Quality writing cost money and these writers need to support in one way or another. Ads are not effective because everyone runs adblock and ads are also suspect so the easiest way to is to directly charge for their work which everyone whines about while simultaneously whining about how low quality most writing is these days. I wonder why?
1) the price is too high for the content I consume. Often I will read a single article from a single well known publisher a couple times a month to a couple times a year.
2) I don’t know if I will find the content valuable until after I have read it. Headlines haven’t been of too much help especially lately where some quality content is under click-baity headlines; though sometimes the opposite is true or more often click-bait headlines do accurately reflect the quality of the content.
3) There is a lot of friction to pay even if the price did match my consumption model. And in addition to friction I have concerns with how my personal information might be used or resold; Creating an addressable audience via first party data is a tactic being pushed by advertisers and marketers.
So while I do agree with your evaluation I think the problem is a bit more nuanced (or maybe I’m just the minority).
Some have suggested a “spotify for news” which checks many of the above boxes but creates its own privacy concerns, may incentivize low quality content in the way ads do, add walled garden concerns, and may introduce fair compensation concerns.
An “open” solution, as hand wavy as that sounds, seems closer to ideal but as has been demonstrated time and again may not be competitive enough to “closed” solutions where winner takes all is in effect.
Mixed feelings about this. I hate paywalls because they inhibit sharing and conversation, but... if people don't pay for news, soon there won't be any reporters. People have to make a living somehow.
Plenty of news channels exist fine on YouTube without paywalling all of their content. Also people will just report what's going on because they are interested in it. It doesn't require someone to be a "reporter" to talk about what's going on.
People will report on what's going on without a financial incentive. People will also write books, make movies, and develop games for the fun of it.
The flip side is that Spider-Man: No Way Home cost $200 Million to make. Sony didn't invest a fifth of a billion dollars into making this movie for the fun of it. They did it because they expect return on their investment.
I appreciate living in a world in which high quality content (news, novels, TV shows, ...) exists. High quality content requires a good deal of investment. And that is not going to happen if said content cannot be monetized.
Nobody's stealing anything. This is even a worse comparison than the industry groups make; in their case it's the wrong law (copyright infringement), in this case no law is being broken.
You don't get to put content out on the open internet and then cry foul when its accessed. These orgs are talking out of both sides of their mouth.
I dont think bypassing paywall is the right way to go about this, I am thinking about a paid news source aggregator where you could select the news source you want and pay accordingly. Information cost money to gather afterall...
of course, it involves partership with a lot of different news outlets, but if it takes off, nobody would want to be left out of it... (rss/atom format? :) )
if anyone is interrested to start this, get in touch with me.
personally, I pay lemonde.fr and that's it, I read al-jazeera a lot for free too, I should pay...
Do people generally feel like digital goods should be free? Seems like people are always trying to rationalize bypassing paywalls, pirating games and using emulators, torrenting movies, etc.
It’s very ironic that this is a tech forum, much of which is software and this view is prevalent among some here
I take advantage (pirate and use this extension) mostly because where I've grown up it was normalized (Eastern Europe) and because it's convenient. Nowadays I do try to support more but I am not so sure I really buy the arguments that this isn't wrong. The way I see it those who support subsidize the rest and that's not necessarily a bad thing but I can be convinced otherwise.
One way to justify this is if people don't feel like paying for something and the business runs out of money, it culls the models of business that aren't working and a replacement will come along at some point if there is any merit at all to it.
However I am not convinced people don't want to pay for digital goods. Many digital goods can be accessed through piracy, like music or TV shows, but people still pay for Spotify and Netflix. Steam still makes a ton of money selling digital games despite rampant piracy. These businesses provide some value beyond the content itself, and perhaps the more successful media/news outlets will have to discover what that is for them.
It is strange those making their living off coding and tech and are tech enthusiasts based on reading HN are also promoting ways to steal the income of others who make their living coding and tech and other knowledge based work.
edit: After checking the repo it appears that this is not a a new extension, nor has there been any recent update.
Seems like a new extension for this pops up every few months until the content publishers get savvy to the latest workaround and someone else finds a new method.
Originally these would just set the referrer to a search engine regardless of where the link came from and the paywall would go away, I'm not sure how exactly they fixed that but I believe that eventually stopped working.
Seems to be a bit of a cat and mouse game at this point.
Controversial opinion: more news outlets should be run by benevolent billionaires who can afford to spend their own money indefinitely to keep the outlet running without resorting to ads and paywalls.
The news can change the perspective of individuals. If only “benevolent” billionaires can maintain news sites, then they can also dictate the perception of real world events by individuals. It is too much power. Competition pushes news sites to adhere to some level of truth.
Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion.
If I make $100k, and I buy a banana for $1, that would be like if someone making $1 million bought a banana for $10. For a billionaire, that would be a $10,000 banana. That means if you're Elon Musk, my yearly salary is like half a banana.
What I'm ultimately getting at is that, to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way.
These philanthropic organizations are packed with money obtained from customers, and I think it's important to remember where they got that money in the first place, and what alternative activities that money would have engaged in if it wasn't hoarded in the first place.
E.g., how much money does my city have to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses that could have gone toward education, health, and infrastructure? How much less would Windows licenses cost if Microsoft had never been a monopoly and had serious competitors?
On the contrary, there is only so much wealth, because monetary wealth represents the distribution of natural resources.
Natural resources are the root of where all wealth comes from, even services like software. You can follow the chain all the way down: a human types some code in a computer, which was made out of metals and minerals mined from the earth. Oil is used to power the machinery that mines those metals, and the human typing out the code eats food grown in farms and fished from oceans.
There is quite literally a finite amount of wealth to go around, and billionaires keep an extreme amount of that wealth for themselves. When they build a $50 million mansion using bookmatched marble and burn insane amounts of oil for their $200 million yachts, they're taking resources that could have been used by someone else, and those resources are not renewable.
When you look at the most wealthy nations per capita, they all have one thing in common: natural resources, especially oil and gas.
Let's say it's 1999 and I'm a worker and I make $50,000 a year. I bought a new computer that comes with Microsoft Windows 98, and $50-100 of my purchase went directly to Microsoft for the license. Would that price have been lower if there were more alternatives available on the market, if Microsoft software wasn't a baseline requirement for conducting digital business for most companies and individuals?
We actually know the answer to that question, because eventually the Microsoft OS monopoly was broken, and now we see that the most popular operating systems (Linux for servers and Android for smartphones) are provided for free or very little cost, and they even include their source code.
That license money I gave Microsoft is a natural resource I'll never get back.
And while this is a nice analogy, it doesn't quite work out in the real world.
What is important is liquidity of the assets. And things like capital gains taxes if one was to liquidate.
Having most of your wealth in your companies stock is not equivalent to the $10k banana. Its probably more like the $500 banana and a big stack of toilet paper.
Absolute dollar value of wealth is a trick of the misinformed socialists like to play because they want to redistribute. Once things get into the tens of millions of dollars its no longer about absolute value, its cost of capital, leverage, interest rates and liquidity.
Obviously, I'm aware that billionaires can't just liquidate their net worth.
I'm just using the analogy to show just how much more wealthy a billionaire is than a millionaire. For example, millionaires on TV news or playing football for your favorite NFL teams are like minimum wage employees when you consider their relative wealth compared to the owners of those organizations.
The point of the analogy is to show just how much the wealthiest of the wealthy really are, to show that these oligarchs are powerful on the level of a state, on the level of millions of regular people.
You used the boogeyman word, "socialists." In my opinion, capitalist education teaches us to fear "wealth redistribution," but it's not even really about wealth redistribution. It's about excess wealth inequality prevention.
When a small group of people become wildly more wealthy than everyone else, even more wildly wealthy than major business owners and CEOs, they become unelected oligarchs that control the state.
So, if your main argument is "socialism bad," I'd encourage you to think of it more along the lines of wealth and power inequality. I think oligarchs want to distort this message and make it sound like "socialists" are trying to force everyone to make the exact same wage, or increase taxes on regular people, or enact a "nanny state."
Not a lot of people want to end capitalism entirely, they just don't want there to be people out there who are so wealthy and powerful that they can control governments without being fairly and freely elected. They want a relatively level playing field where the best ideas win, not the ideas that come from the people with outsized influence.
PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.
PSA: (National) Newspapers incite rage for clicks and revenue generation, and serve as a propagandizing arm for our beloved 3 letter agencies. Their services are essential for ensuring the success of our neoconservative war hawks in Washington to continue to fund their war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars while neglecting more pressing matters like our nation's crumbling infrastructure and completely unaffordable healthcare system. So please help society by becoming a well-informed citizen, and taking everything someone is trying to sell you as the truth with a heavy grain of salt.
I completely agree with your "grain of salt" advice. That said, to lean towards well-informed and away from rage and propaganda, I suggest subscribing to long-form periodicals, and avoiding "here's today's list of horrible things that happened in the world" style publications.
I was careful to add "national" newspapers since those are the primary targets of those who seek to propagandize. I find immense value in a local newspaper that informs the citizens of new or upcoming policy changes, development, and other matters that are more likely to directly impact your life. Support your local papers!
And what headline are they supposed to run with long-standing, systemic issues? “US Healthcare System Still Bad”? News is about current events. Things happening, not the state of the world as a whole.
If you don’t have newspapers, who are you becoming “well-informed” from? Journalists do the work of combing over government press releases, financial data, sourcing, interviews with relevant parties, etc. If they aren’t doing this, who is? The thing is, all of the more partisan news outlets whether Fox or Jacobin, get their base facts somewhere and if it is not their own reporters doing the grunt work, they are sourcing the actual base “facts” from the reporters you don’t seem to recognize.
Yes. Continue to run those headlines until the status quo changes. These are active situations that continue get worse, and continue to currently negatively affect the majority of US citizens. The apathy is part of the reason nothing has improved. It's like we gave up. If you don't keep trying to improve, the revolutionaries will come, and no one will be able to defend what we have against them.
The free press is the only private organization mentioned in the US Constitution and often called the fourth branch of government because of the oversight that it provides.
This doesn't really hold up in a conversation about paywalls. Clickbate generated ad revenues isn't typically from sites funded by subscriptions. Subscriptions actually help fight that.
It’s not just clickbait though. If the US wants a war, chances are most mainstream news organizations will all agree. If the US wants to expand the surveillance state, most mainstream news will tell us why it’s necessary. If the US wants to deregulate, most mainstream news will tell us how that regulation was actually hurting the economy.
I’m tired of the “good news is worth paying for” argument. I don’t disagree with that idea, but I think it’s time for a lot of the mainstream news organizations that people suggest I pay for to die. They had their time, things have changed, and they are failing to adapt. Let’s try something new.
This isn't really true. Almost every major newspaper posts op ed, letter to the editor, or opinion pieces that are often clickbait. They are okay with it because it gets views, and they can say, "Oh that was just an opinion piece, not our actual views" if it goes sideways.
it is fine, Biden said all of this will be fixed in the union speech. Like Trudeau in Canada, he says all the right thing, hard to disagree with him... let's see if the action will follow the words. Personally, I am disillusioned with all of this mess, NATO just pushing forward for decades, now we are in this mess and the ukranian people will be used as "chair à canon" and the russian people will be broke to an extent hard to conceive, even for the low tier of poor american people, which I am also sympathetic too. what a mess.
Oh man; I was going to support the GP post, but then I remembered what unsubscribing from The Economist was like, and my mouth is filed with Bile & my brain is filled with pure sheer hate.
You can subscribe through your phone, so then Apple is in charge of cancelation. You can link your accounts and still view things on the desktop website. (I think they also have bundles to make it non-monolithic, but that probably doesn't translate to your desktop because... that would be too convenient.)
Washington Post lets you cancel through their website without talking to anyone. It's also significantly cheaper than NYT last I checked. I'm a subscriber, and I think it's a pretty solid paper especially for national politics coverage.
I subscribed for a while, and really liked the news! However, a little off topic, there was a very strange several day period where I got repeated auto-playing audio-only ads that I could not stop from playing. There were no audio/video controls anywhere, but I could turn my phone volume down. For days, the ad was always this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYUvgxwuJbA (Dietz Nuts ad, the joke is that Dietz sounds like "deez" or "these")
I called their support asking if this is a known type of ad that they do for paying subscribers. It seemed like a bug, so thought they'd want to dig into it. They told me that this is indeed a thing they do, and that I am not exempt from autoplaying unstoppable audio ads just because I pay. I told them to double check, since otherwise I'd be canceling, and they confirmed that it's a thing, so I canceled. (I'm 50% sure the support person just didn't know what I was saying. Maybe my ad blocker was being screwy somehow.)
In my experience, the Post is basically New York Post/Fox News tier when it comes to the outrage baiting. Sure, a lot of those articles are in the "opinion" section, but even then, the lines between the opinion/news sections are almost non-existent at this point. The comment section is also beyond toxic; it's filled with unhinged conspiracy stuff but from the blue side. At least the New York Times, as much as it's flawed, still has a much better "normal news" section and it's opinion section isn't filled with the most outrage baiting low tier tribal articles. Its international coverage is miles ahead of the wapo, too. The WP is cheaper for a reason.
The op-eds are clearly labeled as such (which I'm thankful for because I have no interest in reading them with the occasional exception). There are also clearly labeled "Analysis" and "Perspective" articles that can sometimes blur the lines between news and opinion, though the Analysis articles are some of my favorite because I find they are trustworthy, and I don't have time to analyze and interpret everything happening in the news myself.
Outside of that, I find the coverage to be pretty neutral or maybe center-left, but definitely factual and not outrage baiting. WSJ is even more neutral, but I find that WaPo has better politics coverage (while WSJ has better business coverage). NYT is similar to WaPo, but IMO a little less neutral with the way its headlines are written. NYT is still a great paper though.
Lots of stuff. For "pure news" New York Times, Seattle Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian. Lots of somewhat more general interest subscriptions also have news angles like Slate Plus, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Harpers, Literary Review, ProPublica, New York Magazine, some Substacks. I realize this is a lot (and is only a partial list) but pretty much all of these listed ones have various interesting pieces I wasn't finding anywhere else. Whereas WP felt very "cable news" to me, just giving article after article on the latest stuff happening at the White House. I can get that elsewhere and am already not interested in most cases.
I would pay for NYT but their unsubscription process has traditionally been notoriously and unnecessarily difficult. I have a personal moral objection to giving money to any company that makes it more difficult to stop giving them money than to start.
Yes, there have also been major factual blunders, but for the vast majority of information they seem to genuinely try and deliver vetted facts.
Ah, the NYT that helped justify the US invasion of Iraq based on falsehoods? That NYT?
Edit: Explanation - the "I subscribe to the NYT" as a pat response to funding news sources puts far too much power in the NYT's hands, and they've proven to be less than trustworthy in the past.
I can't say if the NYT are villains or not, but if they are, you might have better luck convincing people if your only data point wasn't from literally decades ago
In defense of that point - it is probably fair to blame that missreporting for thousands of deaths - not all the deaths of the Iraq War, but a big chunk of them. Don't forget that contemporarily you had an immense amount of well founded skepticism about the true cause of the war which turned out to be quite accurate in retrospect but was decried as unpatriotic at the time. The Iraq War is the first time I personally experience news comedy being a more reliable source than traditional media.
In defense of the NYT, vetting sources is hard and they publish a whole lot of good content.
Too bad the consequences of that "data point" are still so profound that people are still dying daily in that region directly because of that war. When do you think we can just forget about the kind of war mongering the NYT pushed ?
Has the NYT changed anything concretely since then? Because going by the way they still seem completely addicted to "anonymous sources in the intelligence community" it sure doesn't seem like they have learnt their lesson.
I don't want to pay a subscription, I want to pay for content I actually consume. I hate that paywalls incentivize to write clickbait even more than ads do. I hate opinion pieces pretending to be something else. I hate paying for copy-pasted texts from news agencies or press releases. But as with TV, you have to pay in bulk and if the good content is sold separately it's extremely expensive.
The NYT is my main source of news, but I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting it - much as I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting Fox or CNN.
The truth is the NYT is a heavily biased, establishment bootlicking far-left progressivism propogating propaganda machine. They will do whatever it takes to present the opposing view as racist, supremacist, sexist, anti-semetic, anti-gay, and bigoted, while anything far worse but on "their side" is handled with kid gloves. Trump sneezed? Well that's racist, plus he wants you to drink bleach, literally, so we're going to cover that heavily for the next week. Something bad happened? It's Actually Trump's Fault. Here's Why. Trump was totally going to destroy America, except, well, that didn't actually happen, at all, but they're still trying to push that narrative.
Biden bungled Afghanistan, gas prices and inflation is through the roof, Putin invaded Ukraine under his watch, Biden very prematurely declared "independence from the virus" a year ago (!!!), Biden flip flops almost as much as Trump, has more deaths under his belt from COVID than Trump... everything is swept under the rug, a passing mention in all but the most egregious examples, and even then they treat him gently. I recently read an opinion column from a long-standing columnist there basically telling us how we should all support Biden because he just, like, has a really tough job, you know, and would you even wish such an important and consequential job on your worst enemy?
The NYT needs help for sure, but not financially, unfortunately.
Print media subscriptions are some of the best money I've spent. No bullshit, few unobtrusive ads, no tracking, no distractions. Supporting free press.
Fair enough, but I often wonder if this new arrangement in the availability of quality information will cause any problems for the lower class. A lot of political rhetoric does gear itself towards the poor, after all.
Agreed, I think it’s currently causing problems in the US.
In theory public media like PBS and NPR should address the gap, but those organizations tend to depend on donations from the wealthy, so their coverage skews towards their interests and conversational style.
I think the government should provide newspaper subscription vouchers to the poor.
How am I supposed to know beforehand if an article is worth reading?
I ran into a lot of articles on HN which are behind a pay wall (I use this extension), but were not deeply interesting, therefore I left after one or two paragraphs. I can't imagine how much money I would've spent on nothing if I'd pay for every article I click on.
Also, I believe the news outlets have a similar problem like video stream providers: too much fragmentation.
When I'm forced to subscribe to prime for a specific movie, then to netflix for another movie, then to disney for ANOTHER movie, I'll eventually end up just pirating them all.
Amen. Good news is expensive. It takes a lots a lot of resources and trained professional's hours to make a well researched story. High quality investigative news outfits have real, positive impact on society. They root out corruption and help bring injustices to light.
I figure most people on this site can afford to subscribe to a news source or two and probably should.
You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article.
It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.)
It's not a technical problem but a business and social one.
For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party.
The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want.
And then there's a chicken-egg problem of no sites using Coil, so no money in Coil, so no value for the user, thus no value for the content creator. Just like every micropayment attempt before Coil.
As engineers we like to think that everything is a technical problem. But the technical implementation of a micropayment solution is 0.0001% of the work.
> I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want.
Obviously if you just want this one service you can subscribe to it. No need to use something like Coil.
> And then there's a chicken-egg problem
Yeah absolutely. I had a Coil subscription for a couple of months and ended up canceling it because IMGUR was the only site that had an integration with it.
But what I know 100% is I won't pay a subscription to the NYT, The Economist, or any other news outlet to read 1-2 article per week at the most.
Not disagreeing that a new model is needed, but.. I'm not sure Netflix/Spotify is a good example. In order to access all the content I want, I have to have a zillion streaming accounts with monthly fees. The Netflix model in particular is indistinguishable from the existing pay news model, at least in this regard...
The value proposition just isn't there. How does an article expect to compete with a free YouTube video. The YouTube video is probably going to be more entertaining anyways. YouTube offers me a billion times more value than some news site.
Ignoring the fix it tutorials for a moment, are you sure YouTube provides more value? Is it short term or long term?
For most people id guess a YouTube habit provides short term value in terms of entertainment but reading a quality paper habit provides long term value to the individual and society in terms of being informed.
"You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow and then steal it again!"
