| If payment is optional then you are only likely to hand over money out of principle, or your own personal values. I don’t think it’s as simple as finding the same news elsewhere for free though, or accepting this level of data collection, or subscribing to every site with micro transactions. I would pay to use HN if the articles I clicked through to (or upvoted, or engaged with in the comments) got a piece of the pie. I’d pay a fair amount because I get a lot of value out of the aggregation and community HN offers. There’s no obvious allegiance to a particular perspective on life so one day I can enjoy a spiritual read and another I can learn about baking bread. I’m not only challenged, my curiosity is being piqued. It may be that HN works this way because there is no direct profit motive in HN itself except to point budding startups to Y Combinator. I’m unlikely to pay an individual publication (say, The Guardian) because such publications have a specific editorial viewpoint, and more often than not it’s going to be the point of view that supports my own. My money is wasted on an echo chamber that makes me mad about the state of the world. Neither am I likely to pay a publication that I persistently disagree with because our values are incompatible. I might read them if they have something profound to say but I’m not going to commit to them for that. So maybe there’s something in a co-operative effort where the community collectively funds the content it engages with. But rather than it being an individual thing like with Patreon or individual subscriptions, it’s a pool you contribute to in order to participate further in the community. |