• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Paywalls are the norm of traditional journalism. People got so used to a bunch of spammy, ad-fed, click bait journalism and now many are not willing to pay for good articles.

    Huh. You’re not wrong. Newspapers were classic user-fee newsfeeds.

    But you could give away your paper when you were done. Is that early BitTorrent?

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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      18 hours ago

      I don’t know; it’s one of those weird things where digital “cost to copy” being cheap really makes things problematic.

      Unlike BitTorrent you were giving away your access to that item and possibly never getting it back; we don’t really have a standard way of doing stuff like that in the digital era. The closest thing we have is very clunky, greedy, and intrusive DRM systems.

    • criitz@reddthat.com
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      3 days ago

      Other differences: When you bought a newspaper you got a physical product. You could read it, keep it, frame it, craft with it, or whatever you want. It took labor and machinery to create and distribute. The online article costs nothing to make, isn’t something you can keep or use in any way, in fact at any point you might lose access to it.