Comment by zetazzed
2 years ago
Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later.
Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)
Certainly beats a Medium subscription, where you pay (more?) to read 95% garbage when compared with what's put in The New Yorker.
I don't really like the New Yorker, but even I agree it's a way better deal than Medium. I can't remember the last time I read anything on Medium that wasn't mostly vacuous.
There are people out there that pay for Medium?
I hear you. A few articles a year, such as this one, makes the 70ish dollars I cough up every year, worth it.
I've been tempted to subscribe. But I emailed them trying to find out what the price would be after the trial sub expired. They replied that they could not say.
So it seems obvious (to me at least) that they segment renewals and charge what the market will bear.
Wholly agree.
I worked there many years ago, leading the re-design and re-platform (fun dealing with 90 years of archival content with mixed usage-rights) and paywall implementation (don't hate me, it funds journalism).
When you see how the stories get made and how people work there, well, its just amazing.
I notice that the extremists never use paywalls, meaning extremism is allowed to spread unchecked.
If respectable newspapers and magazines cared about society, they'd follow suit, and give the extremists some competition.
I think respectable papers would go out of business if they followed suit. They are usually respectable because they dont rely on a outside organisation for funding, but instead rely on creating good journalism people want to pay for.
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That's because the extremism is the advertisement. They get paid to inject garbage into your brain.
I assume you have multiple subscriptions to respectable newspapers and magazines because you care about society, right?
That said, the answer to your question is 'no'. If respectable newspapers and magazines followed suit, they'd disappear.
The cost of production of extremism/misinformation is much lower then it is to do investigative journalism or fund bureaus, or send teams out to physical locations to report. Fact-checking costs money, editors cost money. It all adds up.
The paywall model exists in many respects because if you are reliant on advertising as primary means of revenue which does fluctuate. A solid subscription base offers stability and predictable in which to run a viable organization - if you can pull it off.
That said, most of these paywalls are not 'hard-paywalls' where you need to subscribe immediately to read anything. They are typically 'soft-paywalls' where you can read a few articles before being asked to subscribe. From that perspective, your argument falls flat.
I have yet to see any evidence that “sunlight disinfects” or that mainstream media can out-shout disinformation.
You volunteering to pay for it?
In his short story Understand, he talks about two superintelligent individuals who are having high bandwidth conversations. Maybe ChatGPT and Bard are those bespoke intelligent agents.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
We continue. We are like two BARDs, each cueing the other to extemporize another stanza, jointly composing an epic poem of knowledge. Within moments we accelerate, talking over each other's words but hearing every nuance, until we are absorbing, concluding, and responding, continuously, simultaneously, synergistically.
For anybody who does not want to pay, your taxes likely already pay for a subscription you can use from your local library on the Libby app. King and Snohomish counties in Washington provide unlimited digital copies of The New Yorker and The Economist as an example.
They also have weekly cryptic crosswords that are cryptic enough to be interesting but as easy to completely solve as a regular crossword. (With cryptics, very good ones are also very hard.)
Just don't try to use ChatGPT to help! (To be fair, it can be useful at general knowledge based clues, but certainly not ones relying on word play/anagrams etc.)
Damn too, actually. Reading the piece, I've been thinkking this publication really dserves to be subscribed to!
Amazing write up. ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the internet.
It is certainly one of the best and most concise ELI5 explanations I've seen.
Too bad that this kind of writing is married to 31(!) ads/trackers on that page. Can the journalism like this really not survive without all that crap?
They sell the perfect solution to this: a magazine.
It's not perfect because it's one time paper that takes spaces or goes to waste quickly. But it's indeed a good solution nonetheless.
The magazine still has ads in it, doesn't it? I'd rather they know my ip address rather than my mailing address.
Agreed. I've subscribed to many a magazine in my long life. The New Yorker is the last one standing as it is excellent from cover to cover.
Interesting that it's such a conservative, opinion-less, air-tight piece. Guess its his technical writing background coming through.
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If this article is the best the New Yorker offers now, I'm glad I don't subscribe.
It used to have high-quality articles, certainly.
I thought the author was uncharacteristically perceptive for a reporter. Yann LeCun or Geoff Hinton couldn't have come up with a better analogy.
The author is not a random reporter but Ted Chiang, a well-known science fiction author. The movie "Arrival" is based on a story by him.
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Analogy of?
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So they can't afford an actual subject-matter expert for their articles?
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After reading the article, it is obviously a publicity piece for the author, and not to be taken seriously.
Is that the best the New Yorker can offer?