On Blendle

Strongly dislike this trend. Comments are audit in a badly-regulated industry. Open discussion of content will undoubtedly play a role in the future of journalism. This is clearly a step backwards, not forwards.

I don't think this is really about trolls for trolling's sake. I think this is about being called out on sloppy content.

We all know that online journalism is a seriously tough business, especially for anyone trying to maintain some sort of reputation for quality. For these guys, it's economically infeasible to make sure every article is high quality because the headline is <insert very big number here> times more important than the body and there are plenty of competitors taking advantage of that.

So when a site starts publishing empty content because they feel that they have to, comments are rightfully merciless on calling BS. Writers get demoralised and publications look for ways to save face. As pointed out, removing a comments section is far preferable to heavily moderating against unfavourable comments. But still, I hate the trend we're seeing.

The Verge is an interesting one. They selectively open comments but many articles remain closed. It's not entirely clear how they decide which articles to open but there at least seems to be a tendency to open comments on the longform stuff they're proud of.

Longer term, everyone is looking for a model where quality is rewarded or at least some sort of rebalancing for the internet publishing economy. Blendle wrote a…

#2 Our users punish clickbait by refunding

In 2015, sometimes it feels like the best example of modern journalism is Buzzfeed. Go to any journalism conference, and their logo will be on many, many slides. As a journalist today you might feel that it’s more valued to write clickbaity headlines than to write pieces of well-researched journalism. But, Buzzfeed doesn’t work if people need to pay per article.

At Blendle we see this every day. Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print. People will only pay for content they find worth their money. So in Blendle, only quality journalism starts trending.

From: https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc

There is a service I read about in the Netherlands, called Blendle - that charges micropayments for articles read from news sites.

I've never used it personally, but their 1-year-later writeup:

https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc

References allowing seamless refunds, for content that the reader doesn't find up to quality. With clickbait articles getting higher refund rates.

"At Blendle we see this every day. Gossip magazines, for example, get much higher refund percentages than average (some up to 50% of purchases), as some of them are basically clickbait in print."

While referencing for content as a whole "On average, in only 5% of the cases a user asks for a refund."