Amusingly, with Mozilla's tracking protection on, Ghostery set to block everything it knows about, Privacy Badger running, private browsing mode, and third party cookies disabled, the Washington Post site not only works, it no longer nags about subscribing.
Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
81–90 of 314 posts
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#82For those of you advocating for a payment model over the ad model, I want you to consider two perspectives. First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. Now consider the editors at the Washington Post, who now have to cater the demographic who can pay their fees. In…
> First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. I am confused. Haven't (good) newspapers been paid products for a long time? Whats different about the internet version of newspapers?
That doesn't mean we should continue perpetuating such biases when it's avoidable. It annoys me greatly when politicians use this line of reasoning. If what we had before was working we wouldn't need to change it.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#83Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear that they are intentionally and unapologetically violating my privacy for a quick buck.
The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.
The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month.
However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very narrow set of news sources and do most/all of your reading there." We're all news grazers now.
We need federation. Let me pay one flat $20 per month bill, and I can read freely from a really broad range of sites-- say "every newspaper from a large wire network" or "95% of the 1000 most popular magazines". It needs to be organized to rein in the publishers, to discourage the "we're the big draw, let's take our content and start a new service" syndrome that has ravaged video streaming.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#84Use umatrix with ublock
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
So sell regular old display ads. Native ads are the future (again).
Not anymore. There's very low demand / price for run-of-site dispñay ads.
Then let's increase the demand by diminishing the ROI of the current ad model. Something that can be done, for example, by using an ad blocker and never ever turning it off.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#86Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…
Well, if WaPo makes a distinction between subscribers and non-subscribers for this behavior (I'm not sure if they do or don't), they they are very clearly giving you a choice for how to pay for your content, with your money or with whatever information that can get out of you, and to that end they don't want you to block that because they actually want to get something of value out of the transaction.
> I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior.
How is this anti-social? WaPo offers subscriptions. I have one. Does that also trigger this? I can't seem to make it do so (but I also can't while not logged in as of now). If paying bypasses this, then there might be some anti-social behavior going on, but I'm not convinced it's on the part of WaPo.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#87Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…
I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?
Personally, all of it.
Honestly, it's not our job to find a business model that works. It's literally the job of a company trying to make money. Find a way that works.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cooperating and working together to solve things. But the ad industry is so out of control that there's no cooperating with that. If they find a way to serve ads that are not privacy-invading, do not expose users to malware risk, and do not consume exorbitant amount of resources on the user end, we'll talk about shutting off ad-blockers.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#88Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…
Well, if WaPo makes a distinction between subscribers and non-subscribers for this behavior (I'm not sure if they do or don't), they they are very clearly giving you a choice for how to pay for your content, with your money or with whatever information that can get out of you, and to that end they don't want you to block that because they actually want to get something of value out of the transaction. > I think it's…
I don't know how WaPo does this, but all newspapers I've tried including NYT and The Guardian and The Economist have a lot of tracking in their apps even for subscribers.
So it's a crap deal.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. I am confused. Haven't (good) newspapers been paid products for a long time? Whats different about the internet version of newspapers?
That doesn't mean we should continue perpetuating such biases when it's avoidable. It annoys me greatly when politicians use this line of reasoning. If what we had before was working we wouldn't need to change it.
I don't think creating a surveillance dystopia that gives corporations and potentially evil governments enormous powers over the population is quite the right price to pay for free news.
I believe that it would be great if free news is available to everyone, but there are alternate ways of achieving it. For instance, in a microtransaction system giving poor people a reasonable sum to spend every month.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#90Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear that they are intentionally and unapologetically violating my privacy for a quick buck.
the problem with this line of thinking is that newspaper people need to actually make a buck. Or else there are no newspapers.
There are a countless ways of funding news. The reason for the current obsession with invasive tracking and advertising to offer "free" access is because it's seen as most profitable. Make it not profitable and newspapers don't go away - the profit model changes.