← Back to context

Comment by carlosjobim

1 day ago

> The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from.

Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.

One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them).

But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles.

Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.

  • That's what I'm suggesting. If music streaming services can offer both gangster rap, classical music, heavy metal and pop, then surely a news/article syndicator should be able to offer access to papers from vastly different perspectives. I want both extreme right and extreme left, and everything in between in the same subscription.