It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate.<p>In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have the details on how to improve the situation, but I think we need more decentralized content creation.<p>Often when I hit a paywall i will simply Google the topic and sure enough there is an independent blog with the same story. That blog costs a fraction to run compared to the big news site I first landed on.<p>Let's spread the information out more.