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Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

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Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#51
post #17
post #6

An article worth reading is worth buying.

Except the industry is stuck in 1995. You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article. It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.) [1] NYT digital cost

Not disagreeing that a new model is needed, but.. I'm not sure Netflix/Spotify is a good example. In order to access all the content I want, I have to have a zillion streaming accounts with monthly fees. The Netflix model in particular is indistinguishable from the existing pay news model, at least in this regard...

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#52

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

I pay for NYT, but I can't subscribe to the paper of every article I want to read. I need some kind of group subscription for it to be feasible.

Ah, the NYT that helped justify the US invasion of Iraq based on falsehoods? That NYT?

Edit: Explanation - the "I subscribe to the NYT" as a pat response to funding news sources puts far too much power in the NYT's hands, and they've proven to be less than trustworthy in the past.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#54
post #6

An article worth reading is worth buying.

The value proposition just isn't there. How does an article expect to compete with a free YouTube video. The YouTube video is probably going to be more entertaining anyways. YouTube offers me a billion times more value than some news site.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#55

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

I pay for NYT, but I can't subscribe to the paper of every article I want to read. I need some kind of group subscription for it to be feasible.

Well wouldn’t the answer be to rely solely on NYT for your news?

Ironically the real solution to this is more ads, but people will block that too lol

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#56
post #37

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough .

How about a group subscription on Substack, distributed to the authors based on the log of the number of page views?

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#57
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough .

Oh man; I was going to support the GP post, but then I remembered what unsubscribing from The Economist was like, and my mouth is filed with Bile & my brain is filled with pure sheer hate.

They made it so difficult to unsub, I just waited until the credit card expired.

I vowed never to pay for a news subscription again. Big mistake.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#58

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

PSA: (National) Newspapers incite rage for clicks and revenue generation, and serve as a propagandizing arm for our beloved 3 letter agencies. Their services are essential for ensuring the success of our neoconservative war hawks in Washington to continue to fund their war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars while neglecting more pressing matters like our nation's crumbling infrastructure and completely unaf…

This doesn't really hold up in a conversation about paywalls. Clickbate generated ad revenues isn't typically from sites funded by subscriptions. Subscriptions actually help fight that.
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