Over 100 people upvoted this but nobody has any thoughts? I will share one. It is a negative side effect of capitalism that monetary power controls information flow.
I upvoted this post and would not have commented if not for yours, so maybe my reason for (almost) abstaining is similar as other people who upvoted. What follows might be a ramble and is just my anecdotal experience on HN:
I've been an HN user for years, and I've found it somewhat hard to comment on anything related to economics or non-technical / pop-cultural topics. Many HN users are experts in their technical fields, and they seem to think this automatically translates to expertise in political science, sociology, psychology, and all the other fields of endeavor where we can't just point to source code to justify our positions. I mostly find that HN commenters are a thoughtful bunch. But, there's a small, noisy group of armchair experts waiting to swoop in and correct your grammar or disagree on some technicality over social issues like this.
Since HN is tech-focused, even posting something not directly related to technology can get your post flagged and taken down as irrelevant. So in a way, discussing these things is disincentivized by the site's purpose. I get that WaPo is an online platform and therefore in-scope, but it's "scarier" to comment on because it's more social than technical.
In part, the act of being a thoughtful commenter also means steering well clear of any flame wars (that aren't related to NixOS, Rust, or LLMs). I.e., it's like jazz in that it's about the notes you don't play— it's the comments you don't make that foster a good online experience.
This is also a US-specific article, and lots of American people are overwhelmed by the onslaught of post-election political news; so, this might be a cultural thing in that people are not commening as much because they're dealing with a big inbox of emotions to sort through.
I still take active interest in political posts like this and personally think Bezos is a modern-day robber baron in the new Gilded Age. But, I'll seldom say so, opting instead to upvote so others can see the post and then move on silently.
Clearly some people benefit from controlling information flow, and some people are impacted negatively. Bezos may make another $1B by controlling WaPo opinion pages, while I, as a reader, may lose $1 or rights or whatever from the same action. How do you balance the two?
I think you just hit on the the biggest threat to journalism right now -- how to you quantify the value of the reporting to the reader.
Financial news outlets have long been successful at this -- Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, etc. They are able to build strong businesses with a relatively small audience often because that audience is willing to pay large sums of money for access. (Bloomberg Terminals reportedly cost up to $25k/yr! https://www.bluegamma.io/post/bloomberg-terminal-pricing#:~:...
Still -- how much value do you get from the Washington Post? How much value do you get from knowing about the inner workings of your government? Federal, state, municipal, any of them? Does being a better citizen have a financial incentive? Can you put a price on knowing about the situation in Ukraine, or Gaza, or even the dangerous intersection downtown?
And without that, how do you justify payment for journalism, which itself is expensive? Or is the answer that the payment comes from people who want to push a narrative, or control the conversation? Is there a monetary value to preventing that?
It used to be ads; before the Internet there was limited advertising space that reached lots of people, so papers could fund themselves with their wide distribution even in the face of competition from TV. Of course, the Internet blew that wide open.
A couple of places have tried diversifying content towards what readers will pay for; NYT has done probably the best job with the branching out towards cooking, Wirecutter, etc. that people do want to pay for. Buzzfeed attempted to do the same for clickbait to fund real journalism but that fizzled out.
I'm asking how do you quantify the underlying value. As a consumer of news, how am I richer now than I was before reading? And is it possible to put a number on it?
If you consume listicles and you like them that's value enough. (Buzzfeed)
If you enjoy crosswords, new recipes, or product reviews, that also has some value people are willing to pay for. (NYT)
Historically, journalism has mostly been finding out about what cross-subsidy works, whether that's real estate, sports, scandalous gossip, etc. that people will actually pay for. There isn't a whole lot of people paying for just the main stories for the news.
Thats kind of my point. The people who have figured out that value, i.e. Bloomberg, WSJ, Politico Pro, etc -- charge for the value. The ones that haven't are the ones figuring out other monetization strategies.
