Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)
The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.
no one ever tactfully includes ads
This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.
Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.
While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not
Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.
The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.
I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.
The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.
