Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/
For the curious I will explain the technical aspects in a comment.
Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
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Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#2Here is a gist of the commented code. It works by fetching the HTML content of the website, anonymously with no cookies. Using the fetch API. In a second step the HTML is preprocessed, removing javascript, inserting elements like images that might be done through javascript etc. The third step is to rerplace the current windows HTML with the clean-preprocessed HTML with the article.
https://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e...
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#3I though people are paid for posting on medium?
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#4https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-unobstruct-230e4e95cf5...
works nicely for iOS/mobilesafari.
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#5I though people are paid for posting on medium?
They do, but you have to apply and be selected. Compared to all users, its a fraction. And everyone else gets pushed into the paywall, because medium basically says: "If you don't we will not promote it and your post will die in obscurity"
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#6Good stuff timar - this definitely beats my trick of hitting the Esc key at just the right moment to stop JS from loading. I've gotten very good at that, but also life is very short and I shouldn't need to! So your bookmarklet will come to the rescue :)
Could this be integrated with Firefox's Reader mode somehow?
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#7This one is also quite helpful:
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
... for all of the folks out there who don't have a university picking up the tab for the articles that they want to read.
It's important to remember that paywalls disproportionately impact those who are not "working" in an academic setting.
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#8Good stuff timar - this definitely beats my trick of hitting the Esc key at just the right moment to stop JS from loading. I've gotten very good at that, but also life is very short and I shouldn't need to! So your bookmarklet will come to the rescue :) Could this be integrated with Firefox's Reader mode somehow?
Not very familiar with firefox or reader mode. But if it's something firefox does with the html of the website youre currently on. Than I see no reason why it couldn't work together. First getting the article with Readium, secondly starting Reader mode.
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#9Do you think the 1,600 journalists at The New York Times, many of whom work in difficult environments (including the White House, lol), should work for free? Quite the Scrooge move.
Re: Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
#10This one is also quite helpful: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox ... for all of the folks out there who don't have a university picking up the tab for the articles that they want to read. It's important to remember that paywalls disproportionately impact those who are not "working" in an academic setting.
For Chrome and Brave: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome. Seems to work well.