I’m going to be honest here. If you live in a poor country, sure go ahead and bypass the paywall. But if you can afford it buy the subscription. Real journalism actually takes time and money. Because otherwise news sites depend on ad revenue which then results in click bait journalism. There is no third option. Journalism, much like anything else, is not free.
What if, and this may be shocking to some, but what if you live in a rich country and you’re dirt poor?
Do you have bootstraps?
Could you… by chance- pick yourself up by then?
I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I was chewing my avocado toast.
But if you can afford it buy the subscription.
That model works great if you tend to get your news primarily from one news source. If you don’t, then that’s a lot of subscriptions, and especially if you want to go look at a local news article that got linked somewhere for a town you don’t even live in. Most of the time I don’t even want to register an account, let alone set up a subscription.
There used to be aggregate subscriptions where you would get multiple participating websites under one payment, and then it would distribute the money based on your actual views. Kinda like Spotify for news.
It always seems to fall apart after a while, with websites just opting for their own individual systems (I guess they get more money that way?).
I’ve never come across a single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I’ve ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn’t like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we’re clear, I’m not saying that I don’t to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it’s worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it’s worth it etc.
But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on some random science journal) isn’t something that I’m really interested in pursuing a subscription for, just because I stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I’ll subscribe just because of one random article… that’s just shitty business.
Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say “hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!”. I mean, that makes sense. I’d then go, “yep, this site has quality content and the type of content I’d like to read, so it’s worth subscribing to”.
But no, instead they’re like “heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking you to pay for a whole month’s worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn’t going to put you off, right?”
I haven’t read anything beyond the first sentence because motherfucking NYT
My hot take is that we need more journalists on the NPR / local affiliate model. People should pledge to their local journalists, no news hidden behind subscriptions. Pay what you can, subscribers get early access to the entertainment / pop culture content, and don’t get blasted with pledge requests.
Disabling JavaScript seems to work in most cases. Not sure why that isn’t listed higher up on here
That’s my go-to technique. But I would prefer that Lifehacker was not publicizing it.
I’m sure most are already aware of it, but to get around it they’d have to lock part of the article behind a “load more” button that requires JS (or even just auto-load it via JS without a button), which I have seen some do.
There must be a reason it’s not done universally though. Maybe because it’d break archives? Not sure
My assumption is that they want the content to load initially so search engines can index it.
From my observation the “load more” type of wall is more prevalent for scientific journals than the typical news sites. Not sure why.
Firefox desktop mode, hit the reader icon next to the url. no paywall
Thank you so much for telling us this!
THIS!!
Unfortunately, 12ft.io isn’t nearly as effective as it used to be, likely because sites have become wise to it and tweaked their methods
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No, the sites just tell 12ft.oi to blacklist them and they do, there aren’t any wise tricks. We can only speculate whether 12ft.io is taking payments or are just afraid of getting sued.
Quick, use archive.is to
stealsurprise acquire every article before they figure it out!Edit: Also, if you can’t visit it, it’s probabaly a DNS issue. I had issues accessing it when using 1.1.1.1 as DNS
https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
Basically Cloudflare aren’t giving Archive.is a piece of DNS information which Cloudflare says is good for privacy and Archive.is says is bad for their ability to load content from regional CDNs
Is there a firefox add-on for mobile that blocka those annoying cookie popups and also bypasses paywall?
I recently discovered that the Firefox add-on, ublock origin, has in its chooseable block lists, under annoyances, a cookie notice blocker with lots of other annoyance blockers as well.
Can you please share the steps on how to configure ublock ?
Navigate to the uBlock Origin settings. · Select the “Filter lists” tab. · Scroll to the “Annoyances” section. Place a check mark next to “AdGuard/uBO – Cookie Notices”.
Thanks. You’re a LEGEND!
You can usually get past a lot of that stuff by just using the reader mode (button in the address bar)
Thanks. This works but sometimes images dont load.
Consent-O-Matic for cookie pop-ups
The Ghostery extension supports auto-declining the cookie prompts.
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The message a paywalled article tells me is: I know I’ll benefit immensely and the article is a must-read, or they’ll tell me not to be interested in the outlet. Almost all the time it’s the latter. Yes, I currently subscribe to one (print) news source.
I see a paywall and I just leave and move onto the next thing
Yep. I also block that source from future feeds if I can.
I’m thankful MS Edge allows JavaScript disabling at the site level. I have several sites disabled and it works fantastic.
every browser allows this
+ublock origin would let you do this
I don’t think it’s built into Firefox as easy as it is on chromium browsers. I downloaded an extension to do it.
If you have a subscription to Apple News, you can use the Share > News.app feature to open most paywalled major news outlets. And the outlet gets paid.
I don’t have an Android device, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something similar.
Use a terminal browser like w3m or lynx.
Plenty of addons to skip paywalls
These comments are great…I work for the one of the largest news sources on the planet and it’s clear most people think I shouldnt get paid. Thanks.
If those news sources don’t want to give away content for free then they shouldn’t transmit those contents to the user’s computer and then run a client-side script to pretend that they didn’t.
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“I would probably drop 50 cents to read a single article from a news site” - a complete newspaper is somewhere between a dollar and three.
A handful of Lemmy users on the “technology” community does not equal “most people”. That’s just bad journalism lol
no, we don’t. we just don’t want to pay several times to read a news article: first, a paywall (often with ridiculous prices), second, with our data. news sites mostly have the most hostile cookie policies in place i have ever seen - they want to “analyze” EVERYTHING, on of the bigger news papers in my country wants to install like 20 cookies just to allow me to visit their site. and third, ads left and right, autoplay videos and a hunger for hardware like a contemporary video game. finally, let’s not talk about the quality of most contemporary news outlets, somewhere inbetween buzzfeed clickbait and being a gov’t spox.
i worked over a decade in one of the biggest multinational publishing houses in europe, right on time when everyting went digital and that experience haunts me to this day.
Ideally I’d just be able to pay you.
The ads that already show on the article page should be paying you. i have no issue paying for services, but at the coffee shop i can read the newspaper for free, paywalling news blocks poor folks from participating
I heard you, but so what?
Imagine giving away newspapers, but some articles are covered by a flimsy piece of paper saying you need to pay before you can rip it off.
Who would honestly pay to read?
You serious ?..so, how does a books author get paid ? Fiction or non fiction. A journalist or photographer ? They should just do the work unpaid ? that’s real people using real time…
Seriously…whatever you read…someone created that…and you dont think they should be compensated…or just not by you ?
I pay for a book.
If they’re giving the book away for free, they shouldn’t be angry that I tear out the ads first.
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Welcome to Lemmy. A place where the user based thinks that anarchism works, everything only being free isn’t mainstream, and that piracy is the answer to teaching big companies a lesson but they will pirate Zelda and talk about how great it is but how terrible Nintendo is rather than just buying Zelda to support devs.
I have been on here 3 weeks and in those 3 weeks I have learned the community here has this thought that they are not as big of ass holes as people on Reddit. However, they are just as inclusive and additionally just different kinds of assholes.
