Look how much of the conversation is driven by traditional media outlets. If people really believe we can lose all that and still have a functioning civil society with an informed citizenry, I fear for the future.
Because with everything clickbait there is no reason to focus on content since articles without it "sell" just as well. And since good content doesn't bring money anymore why bother?
As a user it becomes much harder to find good content, which reduces the usefulness and desire to read and continue the subscription.
But with the internet everything is the front page, and stories only get promoted based on how clickbaity they are. I can look past the top headline, this is several orders of magnitude worse.
Paywalls made this much worse, now every single link has to sell you a subscription. Which is bad enough if you don't pay for a subscription but absolutely devastating if you actually paid for content that only serves as bait for people that don't.
That's garbage. The NYT isn't clickbait. Neither is WaPo, BBC, NPR, Reuters, AFP and many others. If you want more tech focused content there is The Information, Stratechery, Pando Daily.
For nearly all of those there is an easy way to pay, or someone else is paying on your behalf.
This breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Could you please (re-)read and follow them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your comment would be fine without that bit.
I will not start a subscription on a random site because it was linked on HN. I'm most certainly not even part of their target group. And even if I was, reading 1 article a month on 100 different sites is equally insane. (that said, I don't bypass the paywall, I just don't read it)
Personally I'm also not fond of the idea to pay money so that they can track me better, but I know I'm in minority there.
We need better ways to pay for content. Preferably one which rewards good content. Today everything is clickbait and the idea to pay for clickbait is extremely off putting to me.