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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.
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I guess the idea is that such people strongly prefer seeing ads instead of a paywall?
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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.

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Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.
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Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
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> 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!

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Yes, I also liked the crowdfunding model that the defunct YC startup Beacon Reader proposed. It’s too bad they didn’t make it.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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).
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They do get paid, they are employees and get a salary. I pay for the premium plan and that funds the company.
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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.
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>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.

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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.

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> 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.

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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.

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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.

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If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.
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Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
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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.)
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