Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it's a choice. If you weren't going to sign up to a site then it's just a pure degradation of experience to see links you can't use.
I guess the idea is that such people strongly prefer seeing ads instead of a paywall?
I agree it is a choice.
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.
Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month? Maybe you just want the exclusives which even then they often break stuff (at least Gurman on Bloomberg, especially if you care about Apple/OpenAI).
Yes, I also liked the crowdfunding model that the defunct YC startup Beacon Reader proposed. It’s too bad they didn’t make it.
Haha you couldn't pay me to read Bloomberg.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
Goofy option since not many better for privacy:
Could ask a friend to subscribe for you and read the PDF from Telegram.
Only download this ROM if you own the original cartridge!
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
>Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore?
it seems rarer, for sure. perhaps the quantity of good journalism is the same but there's a lot more trash to sift through?
but i wouldnt say it went out of business or anything. there's some fantastic journalists out there still.
I think that sort of journalism has largely been purged from the traditional sources and has ended up on Substack, or their own site. It's transitioned from "I can trust Brand X" to "I can trust that individual because of their track record and the way they reliably report things that don't align with their own world view", etc. Glenn Greenwald is an example. The story around why he had to depart The Intercept (which he helped found!) is everything that's wrong with modern journalism that has pushed people like Glenn to places like Substack.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
> Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore?
So Daily Mail, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, CNN, ABC News, New York Times, FOX and many others all went out of business decades ago?
That is breaking news to me.
the parent's argument is that those companies don't really do journalism anymore, not the the companies themselves went out of business. they are more like entertainment networks.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
Is the Apple News model sufficient?
I think there should be more of it. Negatives for the Apple News model is that it's Apple only and there is no ad-free tier. It's also app locked so you can't use ad-blockers.
But yes, something like Apple News with an ad-free tier that works with standard websites. E.g. the participating news sites should recognize whatever service token you have and serve unpaywalled content.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
Somebody’s got to be paid to write the basic news articles. Maybe we could have a government funded “basic news” (although there are obvious concerns that that might turn into a propaganda service).
We could call it the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it could directly fund local news stations. It could be a hybrid public/non-profit where the government funds some, members stations fund some, and donations fund the rest.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
They do get paid, they are employees and get a salary. I pay for the premium plan and that funds the company.
Too bad the new Kagi settings does not support allowing some paywalled domains to show up.
Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.
I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)