Exactly. Once you realize that "news" is a now a really bad spelling of "entertainment" and come to the next step to see that it's entertainment you don't like (as news is almost universally "bad" and makes you feel unhappy) then you realize why paying for self-inflicted torture doesn't rank high on people's list of needs.
There's an exception to this - if the "news" is designed to inform you how much better than everyone else you are - this "news" can be useful and people do pay for it. It's surprising how many subscription new services appear much different if you view them as "subscriber life choice reinforcement and encouragement."
There are plenty of paid news websites (specifically ones focused on oil markets in the MENA region aimed at traders, some that review court cases aimed at lawyers) and those have no problems at all getting subscribers exactly for the reasons you've specified.
There's more of these than people realize, and some are highly specialized - few subscribers focusing on a very narrow market.
Often they come around because hiring an analyst to track a specific thing is more expensive than having that same analyst do the research for 5-10 companies/groups interested in it.
Households would subscribe to daily or weekly newspaper deliveries and monthly magazine delivery; people would buy newspapers from stands on their way into the office in the morning.
I grew up in the UK in a household that subscribed to a daily local newspaper, a Sunday national, a weekly TV guide magazine, and several monthly magazines. This in a country where we also had free over the air access to BBC nightly television news and local and national news radio.
Did news used to have more impact on people's lives? Or are people now simply able to pick up the same ambient awareness they desire about the state of the world (or at least the subjective impression of something that feels like it) from free internet sources?
I am also old enough to remember print newspapers.
They used to serve a number of important purposes.
Classifieds: want to buy or sell a car? get a job? Buy a house? This was the place to do it. Not actually going to do it but just want to peruse what’s available? This is the only option.
Comics: laughs, puzzles every day. No Internet, no where else to get this.
Traffic, weather: these might actually make a difference in your day
Yes, before the Internet, newspapers actually did things that were useful
Yeah but mostly I just enjoyed reading them as stories of far away places. Now there are almost no reporters who are truly in touch with what’s happening because it’s just event summaries from Ap
> Or are people now simply able to pick up the same ambient awareness they desire about the state of the world (or at least the subjective impression of something that feels like it) from free internet sources?
This. People find some value in the news and are willing to pay for it when there's no other option, but they don't value the news enough to pay for it when the free internet option does an acceptable job of satisfying their curiosity.
You mention TV and radio, but the critical difference is that you can read paper or online news on your own time, whereas TV and radio have their own schedules.
Agreed, especially for the typical "big" news outlets. I do subscribe to my local newspaper because it does make more of an impact on my life. News about changes in our school district or a proposal to make a new bike underpass affect my life significantly more than anything else.
The only other news that I regularly look at is related to my job (aerospace industry). "News articles" (most of them are actually just native advertising) about new products/technologies people are developing, what contracts other companies have won, and company acquisitions are relevant to my job.
This is another big thing people forget - often if you "wanted to know what happened" you bought the latest newspaper. I still remember spending hours reading the details on the Loma Prieta earthquake in the paper - printed on green paper with the amazing "line graphic" art showing how and why the viaduct collapsed, etc.
Now if you're interested in something that is "breaking" you can find live footage and even expert discussion, for free, on the internet.
It did little to make the cost of producing information cheaper; that still requires a human to analyze data, interview relevant people, and synthesize a useful article.
It did reduce the incremental cost of delivering that information to even closer to zero. Yes, serving a kilobyte of data is slightly cheaper than the paper and ink to put a thousand characters on a newspaper, but neither problem was actually all that expensive within living memory.
The major problem is that it increased the value of being that information provider to something significantly greater than the cost of distributing it. Reader attention and reader data can be sold for more than it costs to push a page to that reader, pushing the information content to the side and inverting the newspaper provider -> information consumer relationship into an attention selling consumer -> attention buying advertiser relationship, incentivizing clickbait, advertorials, and listicles. This new format is more economically powerful, and like an invasive species, it out-competes less greedy formats into extinction.
It’s getting to a point where reading paced higher-quality articles that have no direct intent at a visceral reaction for clicks has an effect on my mental health.
I also noticed that news and trends I read about in “higher-order” publications tend to trickle down and have an impact on my local area on a timescale of about 5 years.
I think it's even simpler than this. People aren't willing to pay for news because google/facebook have made it trivial to find free copy cat news articles. Why pay for something that is free?
Lookit all the "information overload" sentiment; and how little of the news is actually relevant to our daily lives.
We don't wanna pay for it because we know we don't need it and it isn't good for us. The grip of addiction or "go along" is strong enough for some to cough up cash, but it's not the vast market of unfillable desire that the publishers want to sell to their advertisers.
Newspapers cost more than their sale price to print: just because you've paid for it doesn't mean you're no longer the product the publisher is selling. It's just a way the publisher makes you seem more attractive to the real market. They know and use their "unpaid circulation" numbers too.
The destruction of "print costs" in the internet age has not changed the underlying dynamic that much.
Exactly. The real cost of running a good paper is renting the office space and paying the meat-sacks (read: actual human beings) to go out there on a beat and gather the news. Printing the physical artefact was probably always low on the COGS.
The physical paper had advantages though - if you were interested in one or two things (say sports and comics) you'd still see the headlines and other content, which meant that the advertisers were willing to spend.
The internet really lets you 'focus' on a particular article/video and ignore basically everything else.
At this point most of us don’t really need as much news as we consume, especially not the kind of “news” that gets created today.
For most of us, news isn’t that different from an HN or YouTube or TikTok rabbit hole, a compulsive outlet for us to waste time in, having little practical impact on our real lives. Certainly not enough to pay for, if we were forced. We would just move to TikTok instead
Also, news outlets shifted from journalism to infotainment and propaganda in an effort to stay relevant in the Internet age. They succeeded, but now few news outlets seem trustworthy enough to pay for them, and we certainly can't subscribe to all of them to form our own opinion.
Outside of this site, I wouldn't consume news for free, and still wouldn't if you paid me. The news is all about the consensus account of what the canonical global social hierarchy supposedly is. No thanks.
For me it's easy, it's all untrustworthy noise being repeated. There's an overabundance and limiting myself to one or a few places I pay for doesn't improve things
Exactly this. And this is why there are outlets that have no problem selling access to their information, because they keep the quality high. 99% of the "news" out there is just entertainment with news as the theme. It's low value, and people know it.
I would totally pay for information delivery; however, most news sites are not just 'information', but instead are of the idea that 'information' requires context in order for it to be understood. Arguably, it's during the translation into 'news' for which we pay a premium, but it's where the most bias and meaningless garbage gets inserted--regardless of slant.
I realize that here on HN, the vast majority of us are in the minority as we are likely highly educated and/or experienced as well as have above average average critical thinking and synthesis skill. But, I don't need to pay someone else to take the information and provide context; I am quite able to do that myself and for myself.
I'm just not willing to pay news sites to deliver not only slanted context-added information but superfluous information garbage (i.e., who in Hollywood is fucking and/or suing one another) just to drive pageviews and inventory space for advertising I will never see.
Dropping The Fairness Doctrine coupled with poor critical thinking and synthesis skills alongside the rise of free exploitation of direct information delivery channels (i.e., social media) has destroyed our world and we shouldn't support it financially or with our eyeballs.
For me personally, I'm reluctant to pay because the value < cost. On the other hand, I acknowledge how important a strong, independent press is so I want to pay something.
Then I remember how difficult most news orgs make it to unsubscribe and so about the only thing I'm willing to subscribe to is Apple News because I can start and stop with a click. No retention shenanigans, no emails.
Don't fall for the guilt trip of supporting a news org just because you abstractly believe in the importance of journalism. Journalism may be important and good but news publishing organizations are mainly evil. There are a lot of different ways to support journalists directly these days.
I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet.
Well in some sense Andy Warhol's vision came to be with social media and us all giving "news" directly to each other. But we're still not the ones making money from it...
I was once a loyal subscriber to car & driver magazine for many years. then i wanted to take a few years off. At that point I started get highly deceptive and aggressive retention ads from that company: "your subscription has expired", "your bill is overdue", etc, etc. they try to make you believe that you accepted another year of subscription when you really have not. So, never again.
And why won't they let me pay for news the way I want? I'd much rather pay on a per article measure rather than a subscription. As a consumer, there's nothing I hate more than a subscription plan. If anything I'm trying to get rid of subscriptions in my life, not get more of them.
Then there's the quality of most news sites. There's a reason why people on hacker news immediately read the comments before reading a news article: it's because the average writing and synthesis of thought is much better on hacker news commentators than the average news site.
I happily pay for digital + Sunday delivery of my city's daily newspaper. The issue is that I'm not going to do likewise for the daily in 20 other cities. I would of course pay for a single issue of another city's daily, from time to time, just as 20 years ago I might have picked up a San Francisco Chronicle at the newstand if I happened to be in San Francisco. But they have no interest in offering that and I have no interest in maintaining a subscription to another city's daily.
I'm really fairly certain I would have purchased many, many, many editions of, say, the San Francisco Chronicle over the years, were that on offer. But it isn't. So after years of seeing the San Francisco Chronicle's popups telling me that the only way to read one of their articles is to subscribe, the San Francisco Chronicle has in fact received $0 from me.
Most of what passes for 'news' on the interwebz is rumour, celebrity gossip, clickbait, or PR puff pieces disguised as news items. There's negligible or zero vetting or fact-checking. Who would pay for that shit?
I wouldn't pay for news because it looks like every news outlet out there is just playing the SEO/Click bait game and it got old pretty quickly for me.
On my limited circle, nobody consumes news because they want to. You find that something happened (Usually in social media feeds) and then you want to know more about that specific thing. That sometimes leads you to a news website.
Some news websites do have interesting articles but that's not always the case
> (On that note, Groot Kormelink noted in a Twitter thread that he has a paper-in-progress showing that “when you do get people to subscribe, the next challenge starts: getting them to actually use their subscription.”)
There's another challenge after that: the inevitable massive price hike after 6-12 months.
I don't even have to scroll the comments to know that HN people are complaining about seeing ads after subscribing, or having to call to cancel their subscription. For me, that's not the issue.
The issue is having a bait-and-switch pricing structure that incentivizes to cut and run after the '$1 trial' period. 3 months later it goes up to $25/month or something ridiculous. And every paper seems to treat pricing differently and have a myriad set of subscription options beyond the base print/digital choices. The article mentions Netflix and Spotify, but doesn't mention the effect of relative price stablility on those platforms that possibly reduce churn, compared to newspapers.
The internet exists. Why should I pay people to bring me curated information from every corner of the globe, when there are many others doing so for free, and the tools to do so myself are within my grasp? Issues of trust and media complicity also exist, but these are just as much symptoms of the first situation as causes.
Its just too expensive for the value that I personally would receive. If I could get a yearly sub to nyt for $25, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don't want some price for the first year, and then it balloons up 4x.
My issue with online news sites is that there are too many of them, and the internet generally doesn't result in me sticking to any reasonable subset to make a subscription worthwile. Give me a micropayment mechanism built into my web browser that lets me sprinkle a nickle or dime here and there instead of being served ads, and I would gladly throw money at the problem. But if there are 1000 different sites with 1000 different sign in mechanisms, it ain't gonna be worth the hassle.
It is very simple why people don’t pay for News much anymore: bias, blatant bias, and damn lies.
Used to be utilitarian to buy a printed newspaper. Sidenote: I was a Detroit Free Press delivery boy with the largest subscription in my town; 325 daily (2 hours), 982 Sundays (4.5 hours) for a grand ol’ $325/month in 1970s US dollars)
Useful things like weather, comic, local events, and classified carried the printed stories for these prints.
I think for me, the problem is that each producer only has some "news" that is of interest to me. I might see one really good NYT article per month and something else in the New Yorker, Guardian etc. If I pay for a subscription then I am committed to reading more of it, even if not interesting, otherwise I might as well just dip into lots of sites like I do.
TBH even some trade magazines are just as tedious even though they cover my interests in theory.
I think someone mentioned a few years back about the need for good news aggregation. You pay, e.g. $20/month for access to lots of articles and the aggregator takes a small cut and then pays the publishes of the best articles. That should at least allow the big publishers to stop producing garbage since no-one will want to read it and also push them to work out what articles have good value.
The obvious political slant of some is also another issue but I don't have time to discuss that now...
That issue is ... less a factor with a good publisher:
- Much material is rehashing of the same underlying content.
- This is especially the case of reviews, where the real item is the content being reviewed --- a video series, film, music, book, dramtic performance, etc.
- All the lifestyle stuff (sport, real estate, entertainment, "home", "life", "style", "fashion", etc.) is essentially advertising under editorial guise.
- So is much of "Business", unfortunately.
That leaves local, regional, national, and global news, politics, a fraction of business coverage, and perhaps science and technology. Several of those are best treated as specific domains where a specialist publication would better serve you.
I would like a local publication that actually addressed local issues. I'm finding this increasingly and quite frustratingly difficult to find.
I pay for The Economist. I used to enjoy getting one well edited update per week that was not full of ads. But now that I don't read the paper version, I have to use a website full of ads and trackers.
I will happily pay for a news product that serves the reader and has no advertising. This is a request for a startup!
Plus endless upsales and newsletters you can't unsubscribe. They're still stuck in the 90s offline world in this respect. WSJ is next — Wine clubs and the likes.
I'd be happy to pay if the cost per article was reasonable and payment is easy. I'm not entering credit card details per article or signing up for large numbers of $10 / month subscriptions from independent vendors however. Maybe something like the spotify model for news could work.
I think a spotify model would make the clickbait problem even worse. I'm unlikely to directly pay for a clickbaity news source, but I may well click on their articles.
I think there would be a natural feedback mechanism would develop. If a news source creates low quality clickbaity articles, users are unlikely to click on articles from the news source again. Brand trust would naturally develop it seems.
Because publishers don’t know the difference between news and noise. Most long-form articles can be summarized in 1-5 bullet points when all the fluff is removed.
I used to have an app that curated topics into short summaries. It was curated by humans but they failed to monetize and shut down.
There's an issue for me which did not appear in the article and so far has not appeared in the comments.
It's that I look at news aggregators like Real Clear Politics and various newsletters, and I sample a small number of articles from a very large number of news sources. I'm unwilling to pay for a newspaper subscription if it serves me only a very small number of articles that I'm interested in each day.
I suspect that others who use Google News or Apple News or Yahoo experience the same thing.
All this suggests that a Spotify or Netflix-like subscription model might work. Spotify charges $9.99 a month to give you access to 82 million songs. I would totally pay for a similar subscription that gave me access to many newspapers.
Paying for access to high-quality independent content is one thing, paying for access to advertiser-centric state/corporate propaganda is quite another.
The vast majority of news outlets fall into the latter category. They'll give you 'free' content because they're not really in business to make money, they're more like curated infomercial services aimed at feeding stage-managed narratives to their readers/watchers on behalf of other organizations and institutions.
Why would anyone pay to consume a propaganda stream that is provided for free?
Some people might pay for intelligence reports specific to their own business interests, but that's probably a pretty small market.
I soured on the news as I learned even just a little, even in high school. I would read articles about physics, or that had physics as an important element, and observe how terribly wrong the reporter got things. Even giving generous allowance for an untrained person discussing a difficult subject it seemed to me they got too much wrong too often, or took liberties (ending up with terribly inaccurate statements) with an expert's explanation in an attempt to make it digestable for non experts. Why should I trust what they have to say about other subjects?
I feel like the ultimate answer is that too many people offer similar quality content for free. For a while I subscribed to the NYT, but ultimately the differential in quality to what I can find on the web wasn’t worth the cost to me. For anything I find interesting enough to form an opinion on I have to do more research anyway, since there exists no single source that is so well made that I don’t have to worry about its bias.
What I do pay for is my city’s local paper, since unlike state or national news local news is much harder to get a suitable quantity of online.
To get to news I have to search through an immense pile of junk littering the news outlets and social media. I have to extract one bit worthy of news from gigabytes of junk.
I go looking for news and I get, old news, comments and opinions on situation X, political activism, other kind of activism, half fake facts, completely fake facts, tabloid news and things that do not interest me.
Why should I pay for junk? If somebody would be in the business of delivering news, not junk, I would pay. But it's hard to find that someone.
Because it's not entertaining, the supply of it already is overwhelming, and there's no real actionable information that you get. Wow, let me read in detail about the politics behind a deadlock in the U.S. senate. Even when something important does happen like the early days of covid or the war in Ukraine, the best information was always coming fresh from the people experiencing it.
I wonder if a volume collective license agreement with ISPs would do it. I still find good, incisive reporting to be highly useful. The problem is the same as with subscribing to streaming services these days: there's too many. I might read from several sources but they all want payment information, authentication credentials, I have to be logged in, etc.
Would anyone notice if there was an extra $1.50 tacked on to your Internet bill? Some organization collects it from the ISPs and redistributes to the new sites based on viewership statistics from a trusted third party with a reserve for new/independent/grassroots/minority sources. Then I don't have to log in, renew my subscription to each site, and they still get funded for reporting.
I'm not super connected to the media publishing world or anything but it seems to me like a concentration-of-power thing is creating incentives for sensational/entertainment reporting than journalism. A system where billionaires wouldn't have a reason to buy up all of the sources for their circus would be nice.
I think you're lowballing the cost, though the total still remains low.
At the 2005 advertising peak, ads income (a cost born by the public through product purchases) was $50 billion. Subscription expense in 2020 was another $11 billion. Pro-rated per person among the 330 million population of the US:
An advertising-free subscription assuming 2.5 persons per household on average would run less than $40/mo. With advertising, the cost would be less than $8/mo. This would fund journalism at the levels of 2005, whilst making the work product available to every household in the US.
We could factor in all book publishing revenues, roughly $25 billion (2019), for another $6.50/mo.[1]
Again, pro-rating this by household wealth / value, would make information equitably avaialable to all.
How is providing access to any publisher at a flat rate predatory in anything remotely like the sense of, say, inflicting the occupants of a public space to advertising subscribed to the highest bidder?
Journalists are by and large full of shit and even most "high quality" reporting is filled to the absolute brim with nonsense. What is left after you take out everything that deals with facts? Opinion pieces. I can get those talking to my neighbours, for free.
It's definitely a longform excellent (free!) article about how good content is paywalled, but the propaganda/lies are free.
-------------Excerpt-----------
But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.
A: The product stinks. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, local publications, if they exist, are abysmal. National-level publications may be quality, but even that can be iffy. The typical large-city publication now consists almost entirely of press releases and foreign outsourced text, if not outright auto-generated copy. GPT-3 should be all the rage any minute now. My household did subscribe to the local daily well past its expiration date. Our patronage alone couldn't float that boat.
B: At the same time, there's a phenomenal resistance to providing information in sensible formats: tables or charts for quantitative information, maps for geographic (say: wildfire boundaries, natural disaster impact regions). The press appear to feel the public are entirely illiterate and are taking all possible pains to ensure this remains the case.
C: Partisanship has increased to the point that trust in any opposing news media is all but nil. In numerous cases, the media themselves are entirely to blame.[1]
D: Broad subscription to newspapers was a brief and exceptional phenomenon. Reading Kormelink's article, the claim is that "print readership has seen a steep decline over the last decades". That is a lie by omission: print readership has fallen almost continuously since the 1950s. World War II was the exceptional event that drove a strong interest in international news, at a time when broadcast media were not a viable alternative. And the Internet was in its extremely early stages.[2]
E: Historically, quality news was at best a minority interest, largely of business and political classes. Mass-consumer press began with the "penny paper" and John Law, not as a vehicle for delivering news to the public, but as a vehicle for delivering the public to advertisers. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
G: For decades, listener support to public media stations has ranged from 15--20%. As with numerous other stubbornly-persistent percentages,[3] this seems strongly resistant to change. Perhaps it should be accepted as a given.
H: The incessent upselling. Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn't sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket. That alone was peace-of-mind justification for not subscribing even to print, and is orders of magnitude worse online. The public media variant is being added to other charities' solicitation lists.
I: Privacy. I don't want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I'm reading. The Stasi and SS would have committed genocide for such data. (And did. With IBM's aid and support.)
J: Relevance. As many have noted here, news really isn't. At the same time, the matters which are of significance ... aren't covered, and aren't rewarded in the market.
K: The market. Basically, information and markets don't work. Market dynamics turn quality information to shit and motivate shit in droves. It's the Sidam touch --- the reverse of Midas. Included in its entirety by reference: "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" (2015) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
L: Subscription fatigue. As streaming video providers are discovering, there are only so many services a household is likely to subscribe to, before cancelling, subscribing on an as-needed basis, or seeking out piracy sites. Entertainment and information budgets are limited.
M: The closest I've come to a solution is that media should be supported on a progressive basis. Preferably through taxes, though perhaps more feasibly through broadband service providers. It's the natural tollgate for payments, and greatly simplifies accounting. There's a reasonable degree to which actual readership can be assessed, though I feel that that alone is an abysmal basis for remuneration. Excluding specific prohibited behaviours, access from both readers and publishers should be without limits, though perhaps subscribers would be able to indicate specific excluded publishers (that is, no funds would be provided to those, from that subscriber's payments). Obligations for local coverage would exist. Separating the content gating from the physical infrastructure also seems highly advised.[4]
Yes, that's a very rough sketch, but it really seems to me the most viable and useful path forward.
Specifically excluded: micropayments, advertising (we tried that, it broke liberal democracy), NPR/PBS's public media model (it's devolved to corporate capture).
________________________________
Notes:
0. I've identified paragraphs by letter, for anyone who cares to respond to specific points. I'm hoping that this will tend to lessen the tendency to think of these as having some sort of ranking, no matter how much a lost cause that might be...
1. How you read that statement will, of course, tell much about which side of that divide you fall on. Likewise, this footnote.
2. Comedic understatment. Pedants, I love you, welcome to Costco, you're my third favourite people, except on the second Thursday of the month.
3. Just a few off the top of my head: literacy rates, espeically when rated by level (about 15% high, about 50% low or none), US high-school graduation rates since the 1950s (90--95%), food wastage rates (30--40%, though with improved transport, refrigeration, and processing, it now occurs later in the supply chain, at far higher cost and resource utilisation).
4. This concept has evolved from my earlier "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication"
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... That itself, of course, has numerous other precedents, including by RMS and Phil Hunt.
I mean, the news is essentially corporate and political propaganda. If anyone should be paying for it, it's the corporations and political parties. We readers are the product, not the customer.
The zero-marginal-cost dilemma results in a market price of 0.
That does not mean a use value of 0.
And with any level of fixed costs, there is a nonzero production cost.
Market function in this case is highly inefficient as it results in underprovisioning and a deadweight consumer loss of value.
Sometimes the marketis the wrong tool for the job.
Finally: you're also misstating what the marginal cost dilemma is. Resources need not be infinite, but rather either non-excludable or with marginal cost below average cost. Both can occur with an otherwise finite good or service.
And an infinite resource might face other limitations which result in a nonzero price. The Universe could well be infinite in dimensions. Even were this the case, such that space is unlimited, lack of access to that space would result in nonzero land prices on Earth for humans.
(Paul Krugman actually wrote a paper on the economics of a space-colonising civlisation early in his career. I don't recall his specific argument or of it parallels my own here, but it might make interesting reading.)
I dont understand what the issue is with what I said. The only cost for obtaining digital content is a few clicks of a mouse. I dont mean that the seller thinks the value is 0, I mean that the consumer does. Add piracy to the mix (a few extra clicks) and everything digital can be free. I am not defending this state of affairs, just stating it.
Why does everyone block ads? Why does everyone look for archive links to overcome paywalls? Because they feel that paying more than 0 is a rip-off
Unless you are a high level political operative or a day trader, the news makes absolutely no difference in how you go about your day.
Oh, so-and-so was caught in a scandal with such-and-such? Neat. Anyway, I’ve got to get to work and then pick up the kids and cook dinner and whatnot.
99% of the news is completely unimportant, but they breathlessly report it like it’s life and death.
For most people, it’s a momentary diversion, and if it went away it would make no difference at all.