> (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important > It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores.

This is already true with the current advertising model.

It doesn't work, since people faced with paywall moe to competition that only has ads. If adblocking is common enough will try harder to make micropayments just work.

> what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important

What people read does correlate with what's important for them, by definition.

And that's why we have clickbait. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is seriously going to hurt quality content. Subscriptions to a wide range of stuff like Netflix and Spotify are perfect. There's something in there for everyone's taste.

It depends on how you define 'the quality'. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news actually.

You don't understand the problem of clickbait. What people say and what they do are two different things, and you need to choose which to listen to.

This is one of the reasons clickbait was so prevalent on facebook a few years ago - people clicked on these so much that they were ranked very highly. But in user surveys, the same users claimed they hated clickbait and wished it wasn't there. So what do you do?

I think it depends on your particular morality.

Is it moral to allow people to only consume the things they believe they need, even if the things they believe they need are only that because they are addictive and potentially harmful?

If allowing cherry picking exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news, does that mean all prior forms of broadcast news publication were immoral (e.g. television & radio news broadcasts)?

You are reading this comment. The are billions of lines of text on the internet you will never read. Is this comment strictly more important to you than every single other text on the internet? A comment that includes a nonsense paragraph of just “banana”, repeated over and over?

Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana.

I would love to know more about this definition.

If doing my taxes were as exciting as my reading list I would get much more out of my paycheck.

If the endorphins you get reading the content from your list is more important for you, so be it. You decide what's important for you, and that's the definition.

So your definition would be "Everything someone does is good for them"?

That reminds me of Austrian praxeology.

Behavioral patterns that lead individuals away from their goals do exist. Such irrationality is what most of behavioral economics policy advice is all about.

It's easiest to explain with the difference in long term goals and short term decision making. There it gets obvious very fast that peoples immediate preferences do rarely reflect their stated and consistent long term preferences.

And if the list just makes me upset because the headline lied?

If a site evades my ability to disapprove and stay away from it, it should not be rewarded.