I started to notice some people posting NYT, Bloomberg or other websites with hard paywalls, that leads to people in the comments that are unable to read the article to discuess the headline without any analysis and some times spreading misinformation, which cannot be countered by the article, due to the paywall.
Which bring me to this: Why does no one thought about blocking hard paywalled articles for the sake of quality of discussion?
If my primary interest in something is talking to people about it, then gatekeeping destroys its value to me. If my interest in a game is its multiplayer, but nobody plays it anymore, then yeah not only would I not pay for it I also would not spend the harddrive space to install it even if it were free.
Imagine you’re organizing a book club. Wouldn’t it make sense to require that prospective books to read are available through the library system? The nature of a book club is that you’ll have to read things you might not be interested in on your own, but it’s worth the effort because of the opportunity to share and gain perspectives of the other people there. Reading by itself is already an investment of time and effort, getting people to organize enough to have a discussion about something is already difficult, so the endeavor has a clear interest in avoiding the presence of an additional, financial, barrier to a successful discourse.
“You get what you pay for” doesn’t make sense here. The paywall makes it worthless for the given purpose whether or not you pay, which is why it would make sense for people administering link aggregator/discussion sites like this one to ban paywalled links.
So we shouldn’t have communities around videogames (or board games), professional sports, traveling, food, clothes, most hobbies, or anything else, because it costs money? Even in a bookbclub, the library won’t have 15 copies of the same book, some people will have to buy it, unless your book club comprises 2 people.
You get what you pay for is exactly right.
IME this is not so much a problem because people are using ebooks and you can digitally check out books from other libraries than the one closest to you. If there is a lack of copies, that could be grounds for going with a different book.
This is not at all what I’m saying. Does wanting to ban paywall links equate to wanting journalism to die? No, but it makes sense to do, and if it making sense to do conflicts with the business model, that’s not a moral problem because people aren’t obligated to help companies make their (imo stupid and harmful in this case) decisions work out for them.
So it makes sense to ban discussing games that are not open source, discussing movies not in the public domain and sports that charge for tickets?