Wouldn't an ecosystem of smaller / walled off news services promote polarization? Genuinely asking -- what you are describing strikes me as an echo chamber that may have the opposite effect.

I guess that's a chicken-egg question. What comes first: a polarized populace or free news?

People who polarize are seen and heard a lot: they use free news articles on social media to spread their perspective to as many as possible, triggering a counter reaction on the other direction, also influencing the journalists because they get clicks.

How wonderful it would be if none of that was free so people had to pay to read whatever has been spread. The blast radius would be limited.

My gut feeling is that 80% of the world are not interested in using news instrumentally to force political views on others. They may get caught up into it, but wouldn't if they weren't continously confronted with it.

It's the age old rule that 95% on internet communities lurk, and 5% post content. The 5% are more insane than average. :-)

Today in 2021 people are USED to seeing free news on social media. But that's just the current status quo. Imagine a society where people did not see or share stuff like that, as seldom as people share music or tv-shows or other kinds of content? There is nothing special with "news". It just happened to be the thing that's free and constructed to make people emotional and angry.

If there were only subscription services not competing with free, I think people would buy something that's as neutral and unbiased as possible.

realistically what's been upset is ad purchasing behavior which realistically could be seen as the origins of media bias in the first place [i.e. literally appeasing the sponsors]

I think that I am with you in this. I pay donations monthly to The Guardian, Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, NPR, Apple News+, and Democracy Now. That is about $35/month. I really try to ignore all other news sources unless a friend sends me a link to an article that they want me to read.

My wife and I also subscribe to streaming video entertainment, which is much more expensive, but she gets good value from it.

Off topic, but as Google gets some justifiable criticism here on HN, I am very happy with their paid services. I pay for Pro Colab, YouTube Music, GCP, and occasionally buy books and movies.

I detest the “free” models for content. I like Twitter because I follow some awesome tech people, but I wish I could pay a monthly fee and not see the advertising. Why they don’t offer that option seems a little crazy to me.

“My wife and I also subscribe to streaming video entertainment, which is much more expensive, but she gets good value from it.”

Curious, what do you use to measure the value of entertainment?

Good question. It is clearly subjective. We review our subscripts periodically and agree on what we don't enjoy enough to keep paying for.

I agree that dedicated news services could provide higher quality content in their domain. However, one thing I enjoy about monolithic news sources is being exposed to stories and happenings I might otherwise not know about. That's what I enjoy about HN vs. reddit - on reddit you explicitly subscribe to content you know you like, but on HN I find content that I like that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

>... being exposed to stories and happenings I might otherwise not know about.

This is the problem we are seeing. People get stuck in echo chambers and, for some, it apparently radicalizes them.

Some commenters are conflating "separation by content type" with "separation by personal bias."

However, I think this idea exists already. The Financial Times, for example.