Quality journalism costs money. Period.
Sometimes it’s ads, sometimes it’s asking for an email address, sometimes it requires a subscription. The bottom line is good reporting is not free.
There’s also a million and one ways to bypass most paywalls that require very little effort (assuming you bother to put forth that minimum effort rather than whining “PaYWaLLEd!” in the comments). Sometimes it’s just a soft paywall (daily article limits, regional locking, etc), but some people still can’t help but whine about it and demand you accommodate them (while refusing to put forth any effort to obtain the information themselves).
“Just post an archive link instead” I often hear.
That’s a terrible solution (and Lemmy UI’s worst feature), and here’s why:
Astronauts Land on Moon: Discover It Really IS made of cheese
Source: archive.ph/abcdefg
Just scrolling through your feed: Is that headline from a reputable source or some trash tabloid, troll farm, or crazy person’s blog?
Should it be believed, taken seriously, or given more than 1/2 second thought? Is it even worth clicking into the article at all?
It’s absolutely impossible to tell because its source is obfuscated with an archive.ph link which tells you nothing about where the headline comes from.
People scroll and just absorb headlines as fact, adding that little tidbit of information to their collective knowledge. I do it, you do it, we all do it. I get it: we’re busy with lives and can’t read every article that gets posted. I’m not shaming the practice.
Having the canonical source of news headlines apparent goes a long way to combating misinformation by giving context to the headline’s credibility, letting you know where the information is coming from, and what, if any, agenda it may be pushing. Obfuscating the sources removes all of those protections in a “trust me, bro, this is legit” kind of way.
It should not be on the poster to accommodate everyone’s tinfoil-hat reasons. If they prefer an alternate source, that is 100% on them to deal with.
PS: For those of you posting quality news with the official links and not kowtowing to the “pAyWAllEd!” crowd, I thank and salute you.
If you’re sharing news and want people to discuss, you should make it as accessible as possible.
Isn’t that the whole point of lemmy?
But not at the cost of allowing misinformation to spread behind obfuscated source links.
I’d say posting paywalled links is just as much allowing misinformation, as nobody can check what the article is saying unless they pay up.
So why not both? Post the article plus the archive link, everybody wins.
Adding an archive link as an addendum is fine. But people still screech that the main post link isn’t the archive one, and that’s where my point comes into play.
I’m seeing those goalposts move.