Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 246 posts

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

#111

Post by coolso »

yupper32 wrote: post #40
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.

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.

The NYT is my main source of news, but I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting it - much as I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting Fox or CNN.

The truth is the NYT is a heavily biased, establishment bootlicking far-left progressivism propogating propaganda machine. They will do whatever it takes to present the opposing view as racist, supremacist, sexist, anti-semetic, anti-gay, and bigoted, while anything far worse but on "their side" is handled with kid gloves. Trump sneezed? Well that's racist, plus he wants you to drink bleach, literally, so we're going to cover that heavily for the next week. Something bad happened? It's Actually Trump's Fault. Here's Why. Trump was totally going to destroy America, except, well, that didn't actually happen, at all, but they're still trying to push that narrative.

Biden bungled Afghanistan, gas prices and inflation is through the roof, Putin invaded Ukraine under his watch, Biden very prematurely declared "independence from the virus" a year ago (!!!), Biden flip flops almost as much as Trump, has more deaths under his belt from COVID than Trump... everything is swept under the rug, a passing mention in all but the most egregious examples, and even then they treat him gently. I recently read an opinion column from a long-standing columnist there basically telling us how we should all support Biden because he just, like, has a really tough job, you know, and would you even wish such an important and consequential job on your worst enemy?

The NYT needs help for sure, but not financially, unfortunately.

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

#112

Post by peppermint_tea »

I dont think bypassing paywall is the right way to go about this, I am thinking about a paid news source aggregator where you could select the news source you want and pay accordingly. Information cost money to gather afterall...

of course, it involves partership with a lot of different news outlets, but if it takes off, nobody would want to be left out of it... (rss/atom format? :) )

if anyone is interrested to start this, get in touch with me.

personally, I pay lemonde.fr and that's it, I read al-jazeera a lot for free too, I should pay...

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

#113

Post by uncomputation »

echelon wrote: post #47
DevKoala wrote: post #4

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

So, piracy turned out to be a great thing for games (Steam), movies (Netflix), and music (Spotify). It just hasn't happened at scale to the news world yet. I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are? I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are. These sorts of "news…

Both Netflix and Spotify start at $10/month which is $120 per year. $50/yr is ~$4/month for 20 news sites, which seems to be a better deal. What am I missing, is the price still too high or is the number of news sites too low?

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

#114

Post by QuikAccount »

I will never understand people complaining about paywalls. Quality writing cost money and these writers need to support in one way or another. Ads are not effective because everyone runs adblock and ads are also suspect so the easiest way to is to directly charge for their work which everyone whines about while simultaneously whining about how low quality most writing is these days. I wonder why?

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

#115

Post by jmckib »

mardifoufs wrote: post #102
jmckib wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fl…

The op-eds are clearly labeled as such (which I'm thankful for because I have no interest in reading them with the occasional exception). There are also clearly labeled "Analysis" and "Perspective" articles that can sometimes blur the lines between news and opinion, though the Analysis articles are some of my favorite because I find they are trustworthy, and I don't have time to analyze and interpret everything happening in the news myself.

Outside of that, I find the coverage to be pretty neutral or maybe center-left, but definitely factual and not outrage baiting. WSJ is even more neutral, but I find that WaPo has better politics coverage (while WSJ has better business coverage). NYT is similar to WaPo, but IMO a little less neutral with the way its headlines are written. NYT is still a great paper though.

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

#116

Post by cromd »

echelon wrote: post #47
DevKoala wrote: post #4

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

So, piracy turned out to be a great thing for games (Steam), movies (Netflix), and music (Spotify). It just hasn't happened at scale to the news world yet. I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are? I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are. These sorts of "news…

I definitely read news from at least 20 different sources each year, without going around paywalls, and I pay for the one I enjoy the most - NYT. (I personally read ~150 articles a year, so that's 33 cents per article, which many readers of HN would earn in 10-30 seconds of work. But maybe I read excessive news). If I really just want to read 1 article per month, I'm often accommodated by some "N free articles per month" policies.

I agree they may be pursuing a suboptimal strategy somehow. Not sure I would call it "absurd". Having 100k individuals producing music on Spotify might be great, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for getting my news that way. But if someone wants to start "Spotify for News", I'm interested. Not sure that NYT needs their paywalls worked around in order for that to happen though.

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

#117

Post by gxqoz »

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.

I subscribed at one of their cheap rates last year and didn't find much in it unique from other sources I'm already subscribed to.

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

#118

Post by fma »

colpabar wrote: post #93
stusmall wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not just clickbait though. If the US wants a war, chances are most mainstream news organizations will all agree. If the US wants to expand the surveillance state, most mainstream news will tell us why it’s necessary. If the US wants to deregulate, most mainstream news will tell us how that regulation was actually hurting the economy. I’m tired of the “good news is worth paying for” argument. I don’t disagree wit…

Wait...so news orgs are bad but good enough to read if it's free?

If they truly are bad you need a site blocker, not a paywall bypasser.

Trying something new would be starting up a news org, not coding a paywall bypasser.

People should just admit that they are cheap.

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

#119

Post by FastMonkey »

xoqem wrote: post #70
hamaluik wrote: post #50

Is there a service in the same vein as music streaming, but for news outlets? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription somewhere at a reasonable price, but not happy to pay for and manage 150+ individual subscriptions (like what this tool provides). Granted I wouldn't ever actually sign up for most of them, but managing even more than a couple would be rather undesirable. Perhaps something with pay-per-view built in, g…

I've tried Blendle in the past: https://blendle.com/ As I recall it was a pay-per-article model (around 25 cents per article looks like) and it had a number of publications to choose from. Though I haven't used it lately, I like the idea.

Doesn't that get you back to the problem of click bait? If newspapers are only paid for articles with headlines that grab your attention, then that's where their incentives will drive them. Part of the attraction for newspapers for me is that you're sort of forced to read the other articles as well.

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

#120

Post by cromd »

uncomputation wrote: post #113
echelon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, piracy turned out to be a great thing for games (Steam), movies (Netflix), and music (Spotify). It just hasn't happened at scale to the news world yet. I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are? I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are. These sorts of "news…

Both Netflix and Spotify start at $10/month which is $120 per year. $50/yr is ~$4/month for 20 news sites, which seems to be a better deal. What am I missing, is the price still too high or is the number of news sites too low?

I read the comment as "I wont pay $50 20 times, totaling $1k, to get onto the 20 sites that have articles that interest me"
Post reply on HN