Problems With Paywalls

I.

I hate paywalls on articles. Absolutely hate them.

A standard pro-business argument: businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don’t like, which you don’t take). They can’t really make your life worse. There are some exceptions, like if they outcompete and destroy another business you liked better, or if they have some kind of externalities, or if they lobby the government to do something bad. But in general, if you’re angry at a business, you need to explain how one of these unusual conditions applies. Otherwise they’re just “helping you less than you wish they did”, not hurting you.

And so the standard justification for paywalls. Journalists are providing you a deal: you may read their articles in exchange for money. You are not entitled to their product without paying them money. They need to earn a living just like everyone else. So you can either accept their deal – pay money for the articles – or refuse their deal – and so be left no worse off than if they didn’t exist.

But I notice feeling like this isn’t true. I think I would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist, compared to the world where they exist but their articles are paywalled. Take a second and check if you feel the same way. If so, what could be going on?

First, paywalled newspapers sometimes use a clickbait model, where they start by making you curious what’s in the article, then charge you to find out.

Here are some articles I’ve seen advertised recently (not all on paywalled sources): “Why Trump’s Fight With Obama Might Backfire”, “This Tech Guru Has Made A Shocking Prediction For 2020”, “Here’s Why Men are Pointing Loaded Guns At Their Dicks”.

I didn’t wake up this morning thinking “I wonder whether men are pointing loaded guns at their dicks, and, if so, why. I hope some enterprising journalist has investigated this question, and I will be happy to compensate her with money for satisfying this weird curiosity of mine.” No, instead, I was perfectly and innocently happy not knowing anything about this, right up until I read the name of that article at which point I became consumed with curiosity, ie a feeling that I will be unhappy until I know the answer. In this particular case it’s fine, because the offending website (VICE) is unpaywalled. I go there and after reading through nine paragraphs attacking “MAGA dolts”, in the tenth paragraph I get the one-sentence answer: there’s a meme in the gun community that any time someone posts a picture with their gun, amateurs will chime in with condescending advice about how they should be holding it more safely, so some people post pictures of them pointing loaded guns at their dicks in order to piss these people off. I feel completely unenlightened by knowing this. It has not brightened my day. It just removed the temporary itch of curiosity.

Some people critique capitalism by saying it creates new preferences that people have to spend money to satisfy. I haven’t noticed this being true in general – I only buy shoes when I need shoes, and I only buy Coke when I want Coke. But it seems absolutely on the mark regarding paywalled journalism. VICE created a new preference for me (the preference to know why some people point loaded guns at their dicks), then satisfied it. Overall I have neither gained nor lost utility. This seems different from providing me with a service.

They have an excuse, which is that this is how they make money. But what’s Marginal Revolution’s excuse? I saw this link in an MR links roundup. It was posted as “5. Why men are pointing loaded guns at their dicks.” So obviously I clicked on it, and here we are. But what is MR’s interest in making me click on a VICE article and read through nine paragraphs about “MAGA dolts”?

I can’t really blame them, because I did the same thing for years. I posted links posts, I framed the links in deliberately provocative ways, and then I felt good about myself when my stats page recorded that thousands of people had clicked on them. Sometimes I would write the whole thing out – “Here’s an article about men pointing loaded guns at their dicks – it’s because they want to criticize what they perceive as an excessive and condescending emphasis on trigger safety in gun culture” – and then nobody would click on it, and I would interpret that as a sign that I had failed in some way. I was an idiot, I apologize to all of you, and I have stopped doing that. I urge other bloggers to do the same – we gain no extra money, nor power, nor readership by being running-dogs for VICE’s weird ploy to trick people into reading its stupid articles. But as long as bloggers, Facebookers, tweeters, etc aren’t following good Internet hygiene, the very existence of paywalled sources will continue to be a net negative for the average Internet user.

This isn’t just about obvious clickbait like men pointing guns at their dicks. “Why Trump’s Fight With Obama Might Backfire” feels exactly the same to me. I don’t want to know more ephemeral garbage about Trump which may or may not affect his polls 0.5% for a week before they return to baseline. I don’t want to get more and more outraged until my ability to relate to my fellow human beings is shaped entirely by whether they’re a “MAGA dolt” or not. And yet I find myself curious what’s in the article!

(Trump’s fight with Obama might backfire because independents like Obama more than Trump, and the tech guru’s 2020 prediction was that Trump will lose. You’re welcome.)

Second, paywalled articles become part of the discourse.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal included an opinion column, Lockdowns Vs. The Vulnerable, arguing that statistics show the coronavirus lockdowns do not really prevent the coronavirus, but do disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people. It’s already gotten retweeted a few dozen times, including by some bluechecks with tens of thousands of followers.

Do you want to figure out exactly what statistics it uses and check whether they really show that lockdowns don’t prevent coronavirus? Too bad – the article is paywalled and you cannot read it without paying $19.50/month to the Wall Street Journal. I personally suspect that this article is terribly wrong, possibly to the point of idiocy. But I can neither convince others of this, nor correct my own potentially-false first impression, without paying the Wall Street Journal $19.50 a month. Which I don’t want to do. Partly because it is bad value, and partly because I don’t want to reward them for publishing false things.

Newspapers publish articles – factual and opinionated – intending them to enter the public square as a topic of discussion. But if the discussions in the public square have an entry fee, the public square becomes smaller and less diverse.

It also becomes more of an echo chamber. Probably conservatives subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and liberals subscribe to the New York Times. So if conservatives post articles from the Wall Street Journal, liberals can neither benefit from the true ones and change their own opinions, nor correct the false ones and change conservatives’ opinions. If you can’t even read the other side’s arguments, how can you be convinced by them?

Third, newspapers make it hard to guess whether you will encounter a paywall or not. Some of them raise a paywall on some kinds of articles but not others. Some of them raise a paywall if you’re linked in from social media, but not if you’re linked in from Google (or vice versa). Some of them raise a paywall if it’s your Xth article per month on a certain computer, but not before.

The end result is you can’t just learn to avoid the newspapers with paywalls. If you clearly knew which links were paywalled or not, you would just never click on those links, and not waste any time. Since any given newspaper has like a 25 – 50% chance of being paywalled whenever you read it, you get the variable reinforcement strategy that promotes frustrated addiction. And since at any given moment you are desperate to click on that link and find out Why Some Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns At Their Own Dicks, you will, like a chump, click it anyway, only to howl with rage when the paywall comes up.

This usually isn’t a deliberate misdeed; newspapers understandably want to give people limited access so they can decide whether or not they want to subscribe. But some forms of this do seem deliberate to me. Like when they let you read the first two paragraphs and get emotionally invested in the story, and then surprise you with a paywall in the third (I think this is why you need nine paragraphs of filler before getting to the one-sentence curiosity-satisfier). Or when they wait five seconds before a paywall message pops up, for the same reason.

Fourth, and most important, paywalled newspapers make it hard to search for information on Google. When I was trying to gather statistics on coronavirus to figure out how fast it was spreading, I noticed that the top ten or twenty relevant search results for a lot of coronavirus-related queries were paywalled articles. Because articles will make you wait several paragraphs/seconds before the paywall comes up, I couldn’t just quickly click on something, see if it had a paywall or not, and then move on to the next one. Instead, a search that would have taken me seconds if all paywalled sources ceased to exist ended up taking me several frustrating minutes.

II.

There are some simple steps we can take to fix this.

First, search engines should give users an option to hide paywalled articles from results. I realize how big a shitstorm this will cause, and I plan to enjoy every second of it. If they can’t make this happen for some reason, they should at least display a big red $$$ sign in front of paywalled articles, so users know which links will give them information before they waste a click on them. If Google refuses to do this, Bing should do it to get a leg up on Google. If both of them refuse, DuckDuckGo. If all three of them refuse, sounds like they’re providing an opening for some lucky entrepreneur.

Second, browser or browser-extension designers should figure out some way to automatically get links to display whether they’re paywalled or not. Maybe something like this already exists, but I can’t find it.

Third, bloggers (and social media users) should stop deliberately frustrating their readers. Stop posting tantalizing links like “Why Men Are Pointing Loaded Guns At Their Dicks” without further explanation! If you find the dick-gun phenomenon interesting, post the link plus a one-sentence summary. If someone wants more than the one-sentence summary, they can click the link, but I’ve done A/B testing on this and it never happens.

Fourth, bloggers (and social media users) should preferentially link non-paywalled sites. I realize this is not always possible, but most major stories are important enough that at least one non-paywalled outlet will be covering them.

Fifth, until the browser extension comes through, bloggers (and social media users) who do need to link a paywalled site should let readers know it’s paywalled. For example, Lockdowns Vs. The Vulnerable [PAYWALLED] or [$$$] Lockdowns Vs. The Vulnerable. This will save readers a click and hopefully make bloggers think about what they’re doing and whether it’s really necessary.

I’m making a commitment to do 3, 4, and 5 from now on. If I ever change this commitment, I’ll let you know. If you notice me slipping up, please point it out (nicely) and I’ll try to correct myself.