honestly, i think that the whole situation was ridiculous to begin with. i'm as much for regulation as the next gal (probably even more so than most people on HN judging by the comments i've read in the last few weeks since i started visiting on the regular) but in this case the government was just trying to offload it's own responsibility to the tech giants instead of actually supporting local news services
I don’t think the underlying reason has anything to do with the government pressure or local news.
I think this has everything to do with a very powerful media company, let’s call them News Corp, successfully lobbying for a new income stream propping up falling numbers and the lobbying not being to hard to do with open corruption in AU government.
When Google/Facebook had the temporary news publishing ban, a variety of smaller news sources surfaced with a broader spectrum of content and opinions.
When an agreement was made, visiting Google News was a wall of News Corp trash content and the smaller news providers had gone.
It seems to be a common problem everywhere though. News services all over the world are increasingly paywalling their content. There's discussions about AI scraping it for free.
The approach Australia took was somewhat unique though other countries proposed it too. But the problem does exist everywhere.
I don't think paywalls are the solution either though. I'm not going to sign up for a subscription if I find an article linked on HN and can't read it. That's just nuts. Who invests in a whole news platform because of one or a handful of articles?
I think paywalls are completely fine. It's the most normal business model there is. I want to read a newspaper, I buy a copy. That's literally how it has worked hundreds of years. Most sites let you peek or give you X articles for free, that's basically the equivalent of opening a paper and taking a look before buying it.
Sure if someone links to something that's behind a paywall and I don't have access I can't participate, but that's just normal. If I'm not willing to buy a book or a movie or a netflix subscription I can't participate in a discussion about it. Probably means it wasn't valuable enough for me. Money is a good and transparent indicator of what's worth your time.
Technically I think news sites would stand to benefit from making micro-transactions much easier, so that I can just shoot them 50 cents with a single click but that's about the only issue with it.
> Technically I think news sites would stand to benefit from making micro-transactions much easier, so that I can just shoot them 50 cents with a single click but that's about the only issue with it.
That's the issue I mean. I won't take out a monthly subscription to a newspaper to read one article.
Isn't there a fundamental difference between buying a copy of a newspaper/magazine vs buying a subscription? I would love to be able to pay a few bucks once and be able to read a number of articles for that. But that's not how it works.
> That's literally how it has worked hundreds of years.
Before the invention of computers and global networks. Now copying is trivial and the value of copies tends toward $0. It only has to be created once, then it's trivial to replicate.
> I want to read a newspaper, I buy a copy. That's literally how it has worked hundreds of years
Ehh, no, not really. Based on your username, I’m your age, so in your lifetime newspapers and magazines used to be something that was commonly found in every cafe and waiting room. As a voracious reader growing up I remember this pretty vividly. Waiting rooms meant I got to read different magazines or read the Wall Street Journal! You could have a single newspaper subscription for a whole multi-generation household. You could also pretty easily find discarded or thrown out newspapers if you went to public places or even ask a stranger for a section they weren’t interested in. I got tons of back dated magazines as gifts, and loved reading them. There were options.
> Money is a good and transparent indicator of what's worth your time.
>I think paywalls are completely fine. It's the most normal business model there is. I want to read a newspaper, I buy a copy.
Back in the days when people bought newspapers, if they wanted to read today's paper, they bought one copy at their newsstand. They didn't buy a monthly or yearly subscription. But somehow you're equating the two.
Also, back in the newspaper days, newspapers weren't funded by selling copies. That money was only enough to pay for the physical paper and distribution (i.e., they were selling below cost, and the fee was only to keep people from taking papers for free and wasting them). The newspapers made all their money on advertisements. Now it's the other way around: the ads aren't worth enough any more, so they're trying to get people to subscribe to directly pay for most of the operations cost and profits. It's interesting that companies (plus those buying classified ads) back in the newspaper days were willing to pay enough to pay most of the costs of running a newspaper, when they didn't have targeted ads, tracking, etc., and were just hoping someone would see their ad next to an article.
>Back in the days when people bought newspapers, if they wanted to read today's paper, they bought one copy at their newsstand. They didn't buy a monthly or yearly subscription. But somehow you're equating the two.
People absolutely did subscribe to newspapers. Who do you think paperboys were delivering to?
Yes, people subscribed to newspapers. But many people didn't. Who do you think all those newsstands I mentioned before were selling to? They weren't selling subscriptions.
Let's say, I share a link to a website that wants to get paid on my Facebook.
Meta won't crawl it, since they don't want to pay. So, the link will show up, but without a preview. Any one who clicks on the link will visit the website first, potentially removing them from Facebook for a little while. Alternatively, Meta may decide the demote links without previews. Both of these scenarios reduce active users, and time spent by users on the website. Fewer engagement minutes means fewer opportunities to show them ads.
On the other hand, those users will end up seeing more ads on the news website.
Or Meta can simply stop parsing such links and not even show a hyperlink. If users want to visit the link, they have to copy it manually and paste it in address bar. Funny thing, many users don't even know they can paste links in address bar. They use Google as address bar. I have seen people type the whole domain name including the TLD in Google to get to websites. Now imagine Google also stops redirecting to such links that demand payment for sending them traffic.
The mainstream media are angry that modern AdTech (Google, Facebook) has taken most of the advertising revenue that used to be their main source of income. They often consider Facebook and Google to be their main competitors, even more so than other media companies.
But seriously, why don't they just drop their opengraph tags, if they don't want to show their headlines/subheadings for free? It's not like they are being forced to add these to their pages, so they should not be charging for it.
> But seriously, why don't they just drop their opengraph tags, if they don't want to show their headlines/subheadings for free? It's not like they are being forced to add these to their pages, so they should not be charging for it.
They know why, because most of their traffic comes from these platforms. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Yeah I think this was ridiculous, the news sites get money from being unreadable due to advertising, Meta, Twitter etc drive new people to those pages.
> "it’s nearly impossible to get good reporting on this stuff because all the major media sites are biased in that they are recipients of these payoffs."
True. Even the ABC public broadcaster gets paid by Meta and Google. Enough cash to create "60 regional jobs".[1] Nevermind regional journalism is something ABC should be funding anyway, without handouts from commercial operators.
Then you have outlets like The Conversation. They may or may not receive payment from Meta (they don't disclose, nobody wants to disclose). I'm guessing they do receive something, judging by their often bland articles.[2][3] And they shut down all "conversation", they don't allow commenting on stories any more. Why increase engagement when you're getting free money?
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-02/facebook-google-news-media-deal-media-pay-meta/103534342
[2] Conversation article: "New research sheds light on the reasons why many people dislike sport"
[3] Conversation article: "Why do I need to get up during the night to wee? Is this normal?"
We can certainly debate whether or not its a good idea for facebook to actually pay for the content they use to attract readers (and therefore advertisers).
However, the problem those laws are trying to solve are real problems, which have very real negative consequences for our society.
viz, The internet has nuked all previous media business models. It is no longer profitable to print news. The only way media companies can make a profit today is to engage in either right wing (Fox, Newsmax) or left-wing (MSNBC, Rachal Maddow) commentary.
Its hard to get this point across, because most people alive today don't even remember what news used to be like. Before a newspaper would publish an article, they would have extensive fact checkers rake the article over the coals, to ensure that no known falsehoods would be printed.
But when the internet came, all the money newspapers used to make from classified ads went to craigslist, and all the money they made from advertising went to google and facebook.
The result is that news is progressively less fact-checked, edited etc, which makes it less valuable, which makes people even less likely to pay for it... etc etc a vicious cycle which sucks money from good players and gives it to bad players.
Now children in florida are dying from Measles because the media tells them that vaccines are toxic. We have the absurdity of people claiming that masks are completely ineffective at stopping an airborne illness spread by coughing. People believing that you can cut taxes and increase spending, without blowing up the deficit.
Where do all these nutty ideas come from? They come from media companies who have found out that telling people what they want to hear is more profitable than what they need to hear.
So what, exactly, is your proposal to fix that problem? Its gotten far worse since the advent of LLMs--misinformation can be generated on an industrial, indeed, an internet scale. How can you make money giving people bitter-tasting medicine rather than sugar candy?
Giving unconditional money to private news orgs does nothing to change the incentive structure towards polarizing rage-bait since private companies will optimize for the marginal customer. The incentives don't change and hence behavior won't change.
You either need to condition that money or remove the profit motive.
Good considerations, but news organizations did used to compete on credibility when it was profitable to do so.
No doubt the law could be improved, but how? How would you condition the money, specifically? Or if you remove the money, what else can be done to encourage a free market which values the truth?
> How would you condition the money, specifically? Or if you remove the money, what else can be done to encourage a free market which values the truth?
It is hard to fight an uphill battle against incentives. Truth doesn't sell anymore if the customer base has devolved into an angry, scared, self righteous, polarized, social media addicted mess. Funding non-profits like Wikipedia and public orgs like PBS, and taxing and regulating social media, could be a start. But funding Murdoch unconditionally so he can further contribute to the problem we're trying to solve, doesn't seem like a good path forward.
> The only way media companies can make a profit today is to engage in either right wing (Fox, Newsmax) or left-wing (MSNBC, Rachal Maddow) commentary.
This is not something new.. In Holland we've had left wing and right wing newspapers forever. And their focus was a lot more pronounced. But this was about political news. Facts were relatively untouched.
> Where do all these nutty ideas come from? They come from media companies who have found out that telling people what they want to hear is more profitable than what they need to hear.
This is the root cause of the problem IMO. It's not the lack of fact checkers. That's only a symptom. The problem is that news services no longer care about the truth. Because they're commercial entities too and they thrive by selling people what they want to hear. And of course engagement at all costs including inciting hatred is something they learned from Facebook and the other social media.
This phenomenon is more pronounced in the US but it's making it way to Europe as well.
> The problem is that news services no longer care about the truth.
Hypothesis: The cause is the increase in per-article-discoverability and the decrease in per-publisher stickiness.
Nowadays the brand of the source is less important, because people often bypass it by web-searching or social-media referrals. The penalty for falsehoods is lower, and the revenue from click-bait content is higher.
Good point. It's just weird that monetisation is still based on this 'stickiness'.
If I see an article in the NYT here for example I can't open it, and they want me to sign up for a subscription. Getting a monthly sub might make sense if I'd lived in NY and read it every day, but really for the 2-3 articles per month linked from elsewhere it really does not. It's a bit disingenious.
Meanwhile it's not just the NYT I see links from but also the WaPo, atlantic, medium etc etc. I can't subscribe to them all obviously. Yet they all want to. It feels like they are stuck in their old business model without considering how to move forward.
> It's just weird that monetisation is still based on this 'stickiness'.
I think that's mostly due to limits in payment-systems, laws, and inefficiencies of small transactions. Indirect payment from another group via ads is the workaround.
In the late-90's there was a lot of interest around a vision of "micropayments", where a user can easily spend a cent to unlock any news article of their choice, but for various reasons that didn't work. (Also, I don't think cryptocurrencies will rescue it, they have their own problems.)
> I can't subscribe to them all obviously. Yet they all want to.
I'm confident some people must have already tried to create things like a "One Subscription Alliance" and failed, probably because of a whole bunch of cooperation problems between the different would-be member outlets.
> I think that's mostly due to limits in payment-systems, laws, and inefficiencies of small transactions. Indirect payment from another group via ads is the workaround.
> In the late-90's there was a lot of interest around a vision of "micropayments", where a user can easily spend a cent to unlock any news article of their choice, but for various reasons that didn't work.
Yeah but something has to happen. It's just idiocy to think that users will subscribe to every publication they visit a handful of times per month. There must be some way to make this happen.
> 'm confident some people must have already tried to create things like a "One Subscription Alliance" and failed, probably because of a whole bunch of cooperation problems between the different would-be member outlets.
// in the late 90's ... //
Yeah, it was well known even in the early days of the internet that this would be a problem. The pioneers were not entirely unsuccessful in developing methods for which people could get paid---we know who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are because of PayPal. It was far short of their original goals, but at least they were trying to solve the right problem.
PayPal was not about micropayments though. And its transaction costs are higher than banks (at least European banks, not sure about US). They were never the solution.
I have to admit I use them a lot now but it's mainly because my own bank has a really retarded SecureCode implementation that I need to use their ridiculously horrible app for. So I tend to ignore it and just use PayPal where I can simply use my Yubikey for auth.
yeah, as I said, they weren't entirely unsuccessful....which also means they were mostly unsuccessful, alas.
This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it.
The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars.
What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax.
Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious.
This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain.
But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.
// The problem is that news services no longer care about the truth. //
But...(using Elon Musk's 6 levels of asking "why" methodology) Why do the news services no longer care about the truth? Because they can't make money printing the truth. They can only make money by printing opinions.
Why can't they make money printing the truth? Because their old business models have been nuked, and its just too expensive for them to hire those fact checkers and editors.
Why do they switch to just printing opinions then?? Because if you can make money printing opinions, you don't need fact checkers anyways. Its hella cheaper to just put "people are asking...." in front of something than checking to see if that something is actually true.
Why can you make money printing opinions? Because people would rather watch a mammarily- and rhetorically-blessed person who is very articulately telling them what they already believe.
Why do they prefer to hear what they already believe? That way they don't have to admit that those annoying self-righteous guys might have a point....
Why don't they want to admit that somebody else might have a good point? Because nobody likes to lose an argument.
*that* is the problem which Australia's laws are trying to fix....no doubt there is a better way, but I can't think of any.....can you?
Yeah, I can understand why you thought it must be an assumption; most people today have lived their whole lives without having any first-hand experience of how news used to work.
But it's not an assumption at all--its direct observational evidence. I was there; I saw it with my own eyes.
Until the mid 90's, news sources competed on credibility--because people would be willing to pay more to subscribe to a trustworthy newspaper, and they would watch the evening news from the newscaster which they considered to be the most accurate.
Because of this, newspapers and tv news payed top-dollar to hire the best reporters, editors, and fact checkers they could. Every line, whether printed or spoken, was intensively scrutinized, and if it made a factual claim--even the most obscure or seemingly unimportant claim--that factual claim was noted, and the report could not be published until somebody had verified that all those claims were true.
Remember a while back, when Anderson Cooper was put in the doghouse for a while, because he just made up a story about how he flew in a helicopter during combat? Well, in the 70s or 80s, if Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings had done any such thing, they wouldn't have gotten away with just a slap on the wrist: their career in journalism would be over. What more--and crucially--the TV networks which broadcast their shows would lose viewers, and they would have to spend years to rebuild the broken trust with their audiences to get those viewers back.
So yeah, I'm an old fart, and I saw how this system worked, beautifully, with my own eyes. What killed it was the business model to support it got nuked. If you have to pay-out of pocket--a couple hundred dollars a year to read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you care a lot more about whether you are buying horseshit or not.
And if the video you watch is delivered to you by Tik Tok or YouTube, and not the TV networks directly, well, the lion's share of the ad revenue will not go to those who are creating the content, but just the middlemen who serve up the content, and whose business model does't depend on whether the content is true at all.
If you don't have to pay anything--all you just have to do is doom-scroll-- well, who wins is whose content sucks you in and glues you to the screen the best.
Alas, I too have a grey beard. I too, was there. I saw the birth of Fox News and various other Murdoch Successes.
It seems two things are being conflated:
- That newspapers needed money to succeed
- That Truth sells
Matter of fact Fox’s success, and the Fox News Effect, challenged my assumptions on how Facts sell and what the information markets operate.
Market economics and consolidation has been a larger factor in how information flows than Truth or facts itself.
From a purely economic view - as the economy and firm profits grow, media firms become takeover targets. You get firms which own newspapers, or Media empires that have soft/political power.
This results in compromised editorial boards.
How something is shared, its appeals to emotions or identity. These matter more. Regional newspapers were the ones left to do important work, but they cant compete with the conglomerates and eventually get bought.
That said - Independent media firms are carving a niche out on YouTube, where they can pursue editorial independence. So journalists are still fighting the fight.
Do note - people who care about facts today, still get them. They just pay for research reports, market reports and studies.
// grey beard // nice to talk to somebody who gets it on a visceral level.
// birth of Fox news // Well, what you've got to explain is not just why Fox news, etc, emerged--but why they didn't emerge earlier?
If it's somehow axiomatically true that selling falsehood is more profitable than selling truth, Fox news, etc should have appeared a long time ago. In fact, truth-selling journalism shouldn't even have gotten started in the first place.
Something changed. It was profitable to compete on credibility before c. 1995, and it was not profitable after c. 1995.
// people who care about truth pay for it //
This is a good point--and also, it's important to observe that viewers of Fox news, or MSNBC, or Rachael Maddow, don't think they are consuming bullshit. They care as much about getting the truth as anybody else, they just think that the only place they will get it is from their favorite feed.
This point needs to be emphasized....if you talk with people who are, e.g. vaccine deniers, they not anti-science. They will be happy to point you to any number of studies (mostly meta-studies), which prove their point. They want the truth, they want their kids to be healthy. Its just that you can give $20,000 to any assistant professor (who wants tenure and publications badly) who will run a "meta-study" of the results of previous studies, which will, surprise, surprise prove what the generous donor wanted to be proved.
It's not that people don't value truth over opinion, but they really can't tell which is which. And it's not just because they are dumb--we all are going be in this situation very soon, if we aren't already. I can't just trust any paper written by psychologists, because of the rampant scientific fraud. Its gotten so bad that you can get a Ph.D. in the field (e.g. Jordan Peterson) and think you are doing valid science, but in fact the field is so screwed up that they don't even realize they are not doing science.
We are all rank amateurs in almost every field of human endeavor--we have to rely on experts to give us the straight scoop. For almost any claim which is made, virtually none of us are qualified to tell whether it's true or false--what's more, we are not even qualified to tell whether the guy making the claim is qualified either.
Nevertheless, it use to work, because the experts and the media were incentivized to give us the truth.
Now they are not, which makes all of us vulnerable, because it really won't be obvious where the truth is, if anywhere.
And its not at all obvious what to do about it :-(
I suspect that some of our intuitions on how a market place of idea works, are ill suited to the environment we have been building up.
This links back to our discussion, because American laws on free speech (and most laws on Free speech), do not build out for complex eventualities.
Eventualities such as a media conglomerate being created, or the proliferation of emotional journalism to grab eyeballs and thus winning advertising revenue.
The current situation isnt ideal for a market place of ideas - or for the kind of high minded ideas we want to see prevail (I admit a bias).
The current situation is completely legal though.
I think the lesson is that after some point, either economic growth or information growth, market forces that sell junk food, dominate the market place.
Here’s my conundrum.
it may be, that at some point, you cannot avoid a big brother scenario. You just need someone to ensure that you can’t sell cigarettes to kids.
But this is the path that leads to every thought police debacle ever seen.
Ideally there would be some way to ensure that there is a free and frank exchange of ideas, without the network being overwhelmed by spam, fraud, or emotional manipulation.
Hmm,
You know what - I think there is something that can be done.
Break up major networks.
Fund regional newspapers through private and public support.
Essentially, we are trying to reduce the power of a single network gaining leverage over other players, and ensuring that smaller players have a way of existing in this market place.
… I feel like I have reinvented the wheel. This is anti-monopoly or cartel 101.
> its fundamentally down to incentives.
Aye. As one of my managers once said, you get what you measure and incent.
> reduce the power of a single network
Recall, there were only 3 networks, so I don't think that multiplication of voices is necessary to incent truth-telling. Indeed, it incents each voice to offer the most florid headlines, as they are each trying to outshout the others,
> free speech laws, Big Brother, etc
What happened wasn't any kind of complex change in human rights---what happened was that new technology nuked the supporting business model. Just like the automobile nuked the business model for draft horses. Happens all the time. If doing something doesn't make any money, you eventually have to stop doing it and start doing something else which does. That's why everybody stopped selling news and started selling eyeballs.
Creating the conditions for which a marketplace in the truth can exist, is a job for business and legislative geniuses, something I am not.
> And if you can make money printing opinions, you don't need fact checkers anyways.
That's what I said next, in other words. It's not even about their old business model, it's that the new one nets them more money which is what their shareholders want. Shareholders always trump principles in strict neoliberal states.
> that is the problem which Australia's laws are trying to fix....no doubt there is a better way, but I can't think of any.....can you?
More state media in my opinion. But I'm more socialist than the US or Australia so mentioning this option is like cursing there. But here in West Europe we've always had those and even multiple for different ideological directions.
The problem isn't really the news agencies themselves either. It's that they compete with social media that incite users to 'engage' them and they've come to actually like that. Which is why it worked in the first place.
Europe is becoming a lot stricter on social media filtering algorithms and I think this is really hitting the root cause too. Though not directly (or timely) saving the news industry.
More state media is a good idea. If telling the truth is no longer profitable, then some kind of non-profit institution must step up, and the government is a good way to get funding.
In the U.S., we have always had NPR as a publicly-funded alternative. It has become a lightning-rod, however, accused of being biased or being propaganda for the deep state, etc.
And really, what would be a good proof that it is not biased? We don't really want to anoint a Minister of Truth. Who gets to say what is and what isn't biased??
Private competition is a way, and, when media companies competed on how credible they were, i.e. the most accurate news sources got the most money, it worked pretty good. But now they simply cannot compete on credibility, because its just too damn expensive to be accurate.
What to do? I don't know, but I'm not willing to just dismiss Australia's laws out of hand as being axiomatically evil. At least they are trying to do something.
the ABC is ok, it at least provides a baseline for news reporting, although like any media it has its own blind spots. i personally am strongly opposed to forcing browsers and facebook to prop up independent media, though i dont have a better solution ready off the top of my head. my gut says that the solution that was chosen was a poor one and a better alternative should have been searched for
// my gut says that the solution that was chosen was a poor one and a better alternative should have been searched for //
Well, like anything which gets through a democratically-elected legislative body, its a compromise, which is to say, it makes everybody equally uncomfortable. I'm sure that many alternatives were proposed and debated.
Since nobody seems to have a better suggestion, we can view this as an experiment. Perhaps looking at the various consequences of this will suggest better ways.
> Before a newspaper would publish an article, they would have extensive fact checkers rake the article over the coals, to ensure that no known falsehoods would be printed.
What? The news media has literally started wars due to not fact checking and prioritizing profits. See the origins of "yellow journalism" and the Spanish-American war.
Dunno if I buy that personally. I don't use X/Twitter at all any more (lost interest prior to Elon buying it), and I only see it pop up in links on HN.
Now that Nitter.net has gone away (to see replies on X/Twitter), I don't even bother clicking on the Twitter stories any more.
