Ask YC: Who would you pay to read?

24 points

18 years ago

Along the same lines as yesterday's discussion, whose writing would you pay to read? Keep in mind that for high quality, sporadic writers, payment might mean more frequent writing.

Here's my list (going alphabetically through my Google Reader list:

Definitely:

- Steve McConnell's stuff is always backed by research and therefore much more valuable than most thoughts or ideas ( http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/rss.aspx )

- Dan Weinreb is rational, thorough, a bit of a legend in my niche, and I'm a bit of an ITA fanboy ( http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/feed/ )

- Bill Simmons (sports writer) is hilarious and my only remaining connection to sports spectatorship ( http://sports.espn.go.com/keyword/feed?query=Bill_Simmons )

- pg ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/PaulGrahamUnofficialRssFeed )

- yegge is funny, and pay-per-post would be a bargain! ( http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default )

Maybe/Conditional: - pmarca if he would stay on topic ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/pmarca )

- defmacro if it caused more documentation and features to be written for weblocks ( http://www.defmacro.org/rss/news.xml )

- Ted Neward is new to me but climbing the charts (http://blogs.tedneward.com/SyndicationService.asmx/GetAtom )

- Jeff Moser is coming on strong ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/Moserware )

- Kevin Kelley is on the bubble ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/thetechnium )

Based on previous writing more so than current:

- raganwald from a couple years ago - the Ruby stuff means less to me than his older topics ( http://feeds.raganwald.com/raganwald )

- Joel a couple years ago, not Joel now ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml )

That's 12 out of 172. 5 were conditional and 2 would be mainly to access archives. So about 2-5% of authors I read are people I'd pay to read. What about you?

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