Summary
The Old Web Is Dead
In the heyday of the web, from the mid-90s to the advent of social media by my reckoning, the internet was a very different place.
Websites were rudimentary, and much more scrappy. Perhaps most importantly, the web hadn’t been commercialized to the same extent as today. While there was plenty of advertising to give site owners income to keep their servers running, it was rare to virtually non-existent for anyone to ask for actual money.
Good Content Is Expensive
Things can’t be any different now. The cost ofsetting up and maintaining a websitethat can handle thousands or even millions of visitors a month isn’t cheap. Website development and administration is complicated. Quality content costs money to produce on top of all the infrastructure costs. There are people behind the website, just like me, and just like this one, who work to make useful stuff for everyone else. Whether it’s for utility or entertainment, it takes time, skill, and effort to create.
Selectively Paying for Sites Works Great for Me
To me, personally, this is becoming more relevant now that generative AI technology makes it easy to createmountains of plausible-sounding nonsensewith no way to reliably detect it. That makes a paper trail more important to me than ever, and paper money is a good way to secure that.
I Wish I Could Always Pay Per Article Instead
While I can afford one or two subscriptions to sites that cater to general audiences, it’s those specialized sites where I just need to read one article where I can’t commit to another subscription. Some sites let you pay for single articles, or purchase credits for a fixed number of articles that you can use on an ad hoc basis, but in my experience, most of the time a paywall is subscription-based.
While I’ve accepted that paywalls are a necessary evil at times, it would be nice if we could get more flexibility. While I’m usually the last person to wish for even more intermediaries, it might even be nice if publications let us share article credits using a central service of some kind, though that’s probably asking for more trouble than it’s worth.
As it stands, while I don’t want to pay for casual browsing, and I’ll put up with plenty of ads on free sites, my attitude towards paying has changed. If I want a good web experience, I have to put my money where my mouth is.
