@molly0xfff that's why I keep pirating, scraping, use NoScript to bypass their paywalls, build my custom RSS feeds and all, and I don't feel ashamed a bit.

I used to be a decent citizen who just likes to read news from multiple outlets, and I ended up paying about $400 a month in subscriptions just to read an average of 5-10 articles a day. That's between $1.3-2.6 per article. For me the average cost per article was as high (if not higher) as buying a whole old-fashioned newspaper with tens of articles in it - which has higher print and distribution costs to cover that can justify the price tag a bit more. And let's not get started when it comes to academic publishers.

We can't complain about "people using the internet without actually getting more informed" when all the routes to quality information have a freaking paywall on it, and if you read more than 3 articles from a source you're automatically supposed to purchase a you-can-never-leave subscription - most of these folks have made it very easy to subscribe, but hard to unsubscribe unless you directly contact their customer service, which in turn will try to convince you to stay and make you feel like a horrible person for canceling. When quality information hides behind subscription walls, of course low-quality clickbaiters will come in and fill the gap, what else did we expect?

Most of those outlets aren't even considering a pay-per-article route - which would be a reasonable trade-off. It's not profitable, it doesn't get the user "locked-in", it doesn't build a "stable stream of revenue", bla bla.

If an industry is so dumb and fails to listen to its users for so long, it deserves piracy.