What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.
10000% this. Or maybe you could weight them as a percentage, with a recommended distribution based on last month or similar for the privacy conscious.
The problem is, the big players who have managed to survive in the current environment would never buy into it. And the second you started excluding bad actors (AI slop or fucking stormfront or whatever) it would turn into a disaster zone. Don’t know how to solve for those problems short of having fuck-you money and making it my personal problem to solve.
10000% this. Or maybe you could weight them as a percentage, with a recommended distribution based on last month or similar for the privacy conscious.
The problem is, the big players who have managed to survive in the current environment would never buy into it. And the second you started excluding bad actors (AI slop or fucking stormfront or whatever) it would turn into a disaster zone. Don’t know how to solve for those problems short of having fuck-you money and making it my personal problem to solve.