xor

Alright, wrap it up boys, we’ve been made

It makes it difficult to use the pavement, especially for elderly people and people with disabilities, costs the council a bunch of time and money to repair, and doing the repairs often require killing off the tree

I think the best example of how deeply ingrained classism is in the UK is the video of now ex-Prime-Minister Rishi Sunak as a young man:

I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class… well, not working class.

I think people often don’t immediately see how stark the class divide is in the UK, especially tourists, because the UK has a relatively large middle class especially around touristy areas. But the difference between Kensington and, say, Middlesbrough is stark

I like him, so we’re up to America + this one guy

When in doubt, double down with more slurs, I guess?

Technically, it’s basically equivalent to “oh my god”, but the Vietnamese phrase Oi Troi Oi is outstanding

I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.

Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.

Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue

b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

“Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.

Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷