I have a few responses to this, but the most basic is: Please dont tell people what to do on their computers.

If your business model is not supportable except by other people willfully hiding information on the client computer, your business model is not good.

"Avoiding a paywall that's only half implemented" is not "the destruction of journalism."

You're willing to wage an awful lot on the proposition that there is another business model, even though both you as well as thousands of now-bancrupt publishers have failed to find it.

Also: your own business model of "living" is just held up by the completely artificial rule of others not taking everything you own. Just because "it's on the internet" doesn't make "might is right" a true proposition.

> You're willing to wage an awful lot on the proposition that there is another business model,

No, for a business model not to work doesn't mean that there has to be another business model that will allow you to run exactly the same business. If I need to fish with dynamite to make fishing in a particular area profitable, and dynamite becomes illegal, it's no one's responsibility to come up with another way I can fish.

I dont have a business model based on living as a general rule, or elsewise some people owe me some money :)

And no, that's not a fair analogy, its me saying that if you tell me something, I am not beholden on your instructions to forget it.

You simply have to use something as simple as a lock and key and I will be forever stopped from knowing the thing (in reality).

All news orgs have this option, they simply want the cake and eat it too of working with popular search engines and also charge users for information that they effectively already have.

If you want to operate a private service go for it, nobody is going to complain about it, and any unauthorized access will be met with scorn (at the least.)

edit: also I am not just willing to wage failed business models all day - clinging to things that dont work isnt a way towards success.

> Stop enabling the destruction of journalism?

My two cents is that advertisement is what is killing journalism.

YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences.

Why is that? Because all that happens in the privacy of your own computer. Usually any newspaper that publicly have printed such bullshit in their pages will be dead. Public will react to it.

What is different? Facebook, YouTube, etc. are personalized. You are shown what you are interested in without public accountability. Niche radical content gets a lot of views for its own controversial nature. Views and money.

Who wants to investigate, hire good writers and expend the money that it takes to write a good article when you can hire some one without ethics for a fraction of the price and get as many or more views as radicalization grows?

YouTube, Facebook and others say that they are not responsible of the content they offer. I think that it should be true for things like comments. But for the monetized content they are 100% responsible of incentivizing that radicalization and killing good journalism in the process.

> YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences.

It is a myth that there is any problem with ads being shown on controversial videos. YouTube demonetizing select videos is nothing more than a way to strangle independent media and help gentrify their platform.

Multiple news orgs have stated in public that they don't care about paywalls bypassers because they put up the paywall to convert only the most amenable readers. This is very similar to the paper distribution model where an extreme minority of subscribers represented the majority of revenue, due to extreme discounts and other subsidies given to most readers.

That's true, but it's also on the assumption that the paywall adds just enough friction and reminds readers "you know, if you like this, eventually you might think about paying for it." Some will. Some won't.

Automating the process by pretending to be Google means the user won't even see that friction or messaging. It's clever, but it breaks the premise.

The friction is installing the addon.

Then these websites should block the ability of search engine crawlers from accessing their paywalled content, which is basically moving the content out of the clear web onto the deep web (which is not the dark web, there's a difference).

If they can't accept that compromise and not have these paywalled articles indexed, then the problem is on them.

They can even have a summary or introductory paragraph indexed while designing a paywall that way. What they can't have is search engines able to read the whole article and not everyone else.

I think this is fair, and so do the search engines. Google calls doing otherwise "cloaking" and says they penalize the ranking of sites that do it. Perhaps they're not doing so effectively enough.

> Journalism has never been one of the foundation of democratic societies.

So I'm assuming the news of what the people you voted for get to you via... diffusion?

> . The united states and democracy itself existed far before journalist.

You should sue your school for the permanent damage they did. Both in terms of grammar as well as history.

In any case: if journalism is so useless, why are you jumping through hoops to read it?

I’ve responded elsewhere in this thread but I’d like to discuss the double standard being applied.

Have you ever been in a conversation where someone talks about something and you said “hey I read this cool article on that, let me send it to you?” If so, guess what - you were the search engine for that conversation. Should you then have access to view the non-paywalled content?

Chabge is hard. You can fight it or you can embrace it.

Sometimes embracing change requires letting go.

You do realize this argument is so vacuous, it would apply to someone torching your house, right?

Simply because the words could be applied to another situation doesn’t mean no thought was put into them. So no, I do not realize that the argument is vacuous.

I’ve simply stated that you can either fight change or embrace it.

In this context I mean that many web users do not want to view their content with advertisements or be tracked through advertising. Attempting to force them to is to push against user behavior (fighting change).

I don’t believe users will change their behavior if you try and force them to.

I believe that by embracing the users behaviour we can learn how to make it work.

I think that might require letting go of our predetermined notions of what “journalism” is and how it should be funded. I think we need to be more open to reviewing why people paid for journalism in the first place and how the need it fulfilled is met today.

Harmful changes can and should be fought. Journalism plays a vital role in democracies. Journalism is expensive. Someone needs to pay for it.

“Harmful changes should be fought” - Harmful is a pretty context dependent word in this situation.

“Journalism places a vital role in democracies” - what role is that? (I’m not disagreeing, I simply want to know your opinion).

“Journalism is expensive” - does it need to be? Why is that?

“Someone needs to pay for it” - This seems quite vacuous. If the thing is valuable then someone will likely pay for it (if they can be convinced of the value and it’s realized).

It’s not readers who pay for it now though is it? It’s advertising companies since they buy the ads. We’re not asking people to pay for it we’re asking them to be visually and audibly distracted into buying products and services in return for journalism.

Perhaps this is not a fair deal for many anymore?