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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

#101

Post by uncomputation »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #44
another_poster wrote: post #21

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…

And what headline are they supposed to run with long-standing, systemic issues? “US Healthcare System Still Bad”? News is about current events. Things happening, not the state of the world as a whole.

If you don’t have newspapers, who are you becoming “well-informed” from? Journalists do the work of combing over government press releases, financial data, sourcing, interviews with relevant parties, etc. If they aren’t doing this, who is? The thing is, all of the more partisan news outlets whether Fox or Jacobin, get their base facts somewhere and if it is not their own reporters doing the grunt work, they are sourcing the actual base “facts” from the reporters you don’t seem to recognize.

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

#102

Post by mardifoufs »

jmckib wrote: post #62
pier25 wrote: 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 .

Washington Post lets you cancel through their website without talking to anyone. It's also significantly cheaper than NYT last I checked. I'm a subscriber, and I think it's a pretty solid paper especially for national politics coverage.

In my experience, the Post is basically New York Post/Fox News tier when it comes to the outrage baiting. Sure, a lot of those articles are in the "opinion" section, but even then, the lines between the opinion/news sections are almost non-existent at this point. The comment section is also beyond toxic; it's filled with unhinged conspiracy stuff but from the blue side. At least the New York Times, as much as it's flawed, still has a much better "normal news" section and it's opinion section isn't filled with the most outrage baiting low tier tribal articles. Its international coverage is miles ahead of the wapo, too. The WP is cheaper for a reason.

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

#104

Post by mint2 »

charcircuit wrote: post #54
makach wrote: 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.

Ignoring the fix it tutorials for a moment, are you sure YouTube provides more value? Is it short term or long term?

For most people id guess a YouTube habit provides short term value in terms of entertainment but reading a quality paper habit provides long term value to the individual and society in terms of being informed.

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

#106

Post by J5892 »

unicornporn wrote: post #29
DevKoala wrote: post #4

This is cool, but how is it different from piracy?

Is this Hacker News?

Judging from the current sentiment around piracy among younger generations, I've concluded that MPAA/RIAA propaganda against piracy has been a rousing success.

My philosophy has always been: Pay for things if you are able, it's convenient, and pricing is fair. And if piracy is easier than paying, piracy always wins.

It's the reason I buy all my video games now and rarely pirate music anymore, but half of my TV and movies come through my seedbox.

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

#107

Post by dangus »

Victerius wrote: post #15
dangus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If billionaires were benevolent they wouldn't be billionaires.

Bill Gates?

Not everyone shares that opinion, including myself. This article does a great job of explaining some reasons why:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi...

Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion.

If I make $100k, and I buy a banana for $1, that would be like if someone making $1 million bought a banana for $10. For a billionaire, that would be a $10,000 banana. That means if you're Elon Musk, my yearly salary is like half a banana.

What I'm ultimately getting at is that, to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way.

These philanthropic organizations are packed with money obtained from customers, and I think it's important to remember where they got that money in the first place, and what alternative activities that money would have engaged in if it wasn't hoarded in the first place.

E.g., how much money does my city have to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses that could have gone toward education, health, and infrastructure? How much less would Windows licenses cost if Microsoft had never been a monopoly and had serious competitors?

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

#108

Post by mint2 »

endisneigh wrote: post #34

Do people generally feel like digital goods should be free? Seems like people are always trying to rationalize bypassing paywalls, pirating games and using emulators, torrenting movies, etc. It’s very ironic that this is a tech forum, much of which is software and this view is prevalent among some here

It is strange those making their living off coding and tech and are tech enthusiasts based on reading HN are also promoting ways to steal the income of others who make their living coding and tech and other knowledge based work.

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

#109

Post by mardifoufs »

______-_-______ wrote: post #74
zdw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't say if the NYT are villains or not, but if they are, you might have better luck convincing people if your only data point wasn't from literally decades ago

Too bad the consequences of that "data point" are still so profound that people are still dying daily in that region directly because of that war. When do you think we can just forget about the kind of war mongering the NYT pushed ?

Has the NYT changed anything concretely since then? Because going by the way they still seem completely addicted to "anonymous sources in the intelligence community" it sure doesn't seem like they have learnt their lesson.

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

#110

Post by misterbwong »

theturtletalks wrote: post #22
DevKoala wrote: post #4

This is cool, but how is it different from piracy?

I'm not sure it crosses the line. Most of these websites have the text in the HTML, but hidden to the user. This is so Google can index and send traffic based on search. If the HTML is sent to the client, accessing it is not piracy.

I'm not quite understanding the logic here. Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it? Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index?
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