If you pay for Netflix, but you complain about writers having paywalls, you just told us an awful lot about your worldview and your values and it’s not fucking pretty.
@Daojoan Netflix is $10/month, plain and simple. But nobody can subscribe to dozens of publications at that price.
What they need to do is start to charge per piece, a small amount. People would pay a dollar (for instance) to read one article they're especially interested in. I don't know why this hasn't already happened tbh.
@babs_at_masto @Daojoan the problem per-piece is the repeated entering of payment information as well as the base transaction fees that card companies charge.
But also for the list of subscriptions it's the same basic problem as streaming services too... when it's a single service that provides the vast majority of what you want, that's great... maybe if it's 2 or 3 services... but when it's 8 or 9...
And useful to note how streaming compares vs buying individual episodes/movies/songs...
@shiri @babs_at_masto exactly. Not to mention - paying per article creates perverse incentives. It means the goal for publications and writers is to publish enough individual pieces that get enough attention to drive enough people to pay a micro transaction, to fund the rest of the publication.
And I’ll tell you exactly what that leads to: clickbait sensationalism.
I think there could be a service that does this, though - a central sort of clearinghouse you might pay a monthly fee to (or get billed at the end) and then just charge against that fee or whatever.
But maybe there's just not a market for it, I don't know.
I have never had more than 1 streaming service at a time, myself! Can't imagine paying for more than one, but then I'm kind of cheap....
@babs_at_masto it has happened multiple times, and it’s failed. It’s costly to implement, every transaction costs credit card fees that someone has to pay that eat into the profit, and in every case, users have not adopted the tech and used it to pay for content.
Nobody’s asking readers to subscribe to every paywall. Just like viewers don’t pay for every streaming service. But if you pay for Netflix, pick one creator or news service and pay for that too. Just one.