2023-08-26 Paywalls

Sitting in a hotel room in Bordeaux, having had seafood and wine, and now slightly dizzy.

@Sheril was wondering about paywalls meaning that quality news is now a privilege. Fake news is free. One thing that worries me regarding paywalls is that I can’t possibly subscribe to the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, plus the three or four Swiss newspapers that I’m not subscribed to. How does it affect our public discourse if we can only talk about the news we are paying for? Back to coffee houses and reading the papers physically present on premise? That can’t be right. I feel that subscribing to one or two newspapers is all I can do and I still expect to access the other newspapers online when people online link to them.

@Sheril

@slowbikeiain Suggested micropayments but I think the last 30 years have shown that micropayments just don’t work. I got an account somewhere to pay for a comic by Scott McCloud at the time. His book Understanding Comics came out in 1993 – I probably gave it a try a few years later though. Anyway, I’m not sure what the problem is: the money laundry regulations forcing micropayment providers to be little banks or the minimum fees of credit card companies or whatever. But effectively, nothing is working.

@slowbikeiain

​#Media

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