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Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

robinwinslow.uk

51–60 of 147 posts

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#51

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite. It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.

And yet Bandcamp seems to be doing just fine.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#52
post #9

I've been getting less and less success with 12ft.io. I mostly use it on my phone. On my computer I use Bypass Paywall Clean[0] (chrome/firefox addon) which uses different tricks to access the full article. [0] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Safe to install random add-ons like this?

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#53

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite. It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.

Plus, as with everything involving money, this would cause even more clickbait to get those 25c out of you.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#54
post #32

In my opinion if we keep popularizing technologies like this we will lose them. Look at the number of websites that are now blocking ad blockers because we all installed ad blockers on our parents machines and popularized the technology. We should keep some technology under the radar and just for hackers.

Perhaps this is the ultimate way to gatekeep paywall circumvention for hackers only, you have to build your own novel solution for yourself.

/s

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#55

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite. It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.

Isn't that the 12ft pivot? They can offer people a $10/mo subscription and then give them 100 articles or something spread across all the major publications, and forward that revenue "on demand". It's a classic pirate start: 12ft starts out life by hand subscribing to all the pubs, violating ToS by proxying 3rd party traffic through those subscriptions, demonstrating demand, and then they reach out to publications (carefully) and find out if they'd be willing to take a monthly check from 12ft that is less than they'd get if your N customers were paying the full subscription fee, but far more than the 0 you're currently getting from those customers. I think it's a good idea. Actually a great idea.

The key is going to be dealing with narrow-minded execs irrationally attached to their current business model(s), and they will argue that this product removes their leverage to get more full-subscription customers. But if they can be rational and at least do the experiment, they'd get an easy OOM improvement in revenue.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#56
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does proof of stake take care of this scalability issue? There are POS based coins. I'm curious why they haven't entertained this use case yet.

Transaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.

Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#57
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably a use-case for crypto currency I could actually support... except the gas fees make it worse than the MC/Visa rails

Does proof of stake take care of this scalability issue? There are POS based coins. I'm curious why they haven't entertained this use case yet.

Moving to PoS is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for reducing transaction fees. The Ethereum merge will reduce them slightly (as it will reduce the block time from 16 seconds to 12 seconds, or something like that) but it won't make any big difference. In the coming year, there probably will also be general ZK-rollups on Ethereum mainnet that will reduce transaction fees substantially. (You can already use ZK-rollups for some limited things like transactions, but not for arbitrary Ethereum operations.) Also, way out in the future, there will be data sharding which will reduce fees on mainnet significantly, look up "proto-danksharding".

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#58

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Flive... Ooops.

More reliable method I've found is creating a bookmarklet with this as the url: javascript:window.location.href="https://archive.is/newest/"+location.href Click the bookmark when you're on a paywalled article, and it'll redirect to the latest archived version of it/

In this case it just redirects to a short description :/

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#59

> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge. That is some Grade-A willful ignorance. Professional writers who perform their due diligence get paid. Professional photographers who travel and document important causes get paid. Editors who ensure accuracy and…

How about login walls for free content? Most news sites allow for a limited number of free articles a month except that their version of free requires I create an account and log in. So a major news site like the nytimes will always surface to the top of Google search results and if I select their article I am met with:

>"Thanks for reading The Times. Create your free account or log in to continue reading."

And even should you go through with creating an account and logging in, you are stuck with an ever present creeping footer that advertises a paid subscription as well as advertisements that are inserted between paragraphs of the article.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#60
post #32

In my opinion if we keep popularizing technologies like this we will lose them. Look at the number of websites that are now blocking ad blockers because we all installed ad blockers on our parents machines and popularized the technology. We should keep some technology under the radar and just for hackers.

maybe we need some kind of workaround for adblocker-blockers.

load the entire page including the ads and javascript and strip it out on the client side for rendering.

make the httpd side think that the client is a dead normal microsoft edge or chrome browser with zero plugins installed and deliver the page.

it's an arms race the adblocker-blockers aren't going to win.

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