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Ankush's avatar

Loved reading this piece, thanks for the openness in sharing this

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Pritesh's avatar

Guide me. At the end of a post, lead me to more posts from the same publication and/or related posts from other publications. Think YouTube’s “related videos” section.

This is a really big miss. Current end of the post is such a bad experience when I invested time & energy on someone's work. It should clearly take me to more of them, the attention was saved by the author and they deserved to guide it to the right place.

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Ed's avatar

Love the sentiment and thank you for the honesty, I also want to support but there's only so much I can subscribe to. Ironically your post ended with

You're currently a free subscriber to Elizabeth Laraki. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.

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Elizabeth Laraki's avatar

Haha...oh the irony!

But seriously, it's so bad. I feel I can only put a button at the end so it's not so awful and disruptive for current subscribers. And I totally feel your pain. My inbox is already drowning in free subscription posts and no, it would be ridiculous to pay for subscriptions to a bunch of different subscribers.

Most other services, like paywalled news sites or YouTube offer premium subscriptions where users can effectively pay for content or pay to skip ads. The "pay per publication" model is a tough one for readers, but it is definitely still possible to make a great non-spammy experience for readers — with a bit more consideration to the overall user experience.

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Ed's avatar

Yes, I read that this was the medium model but ultimately didn't work due to content distribution issues. I guess if there was some type of 'graze' function where you could read one or two paid articles for a nominal amount vs the commitment would be nice

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