I’ve never come across any single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I’ve ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn’t like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we’re clear, I’m not saying that I don’t to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it’s worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it’s worth it etc.

But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on one random science journal) isn’t something that I’m really interested in pursuing a subscription for, I’ve only stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I’ll subscribe just because of one random article… that’s just shitty business.

Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say “hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!”. I mean, that makes sense.

But no, instead they’re like “heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking to pay for an entire month’s worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn’t going to put you off, right?”