Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package • Hacker News Board

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#21

Post by NoboruWataya » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

Quality reporting isn't free (I know, I sound like a paywall myself, but it's true). It involves people traveling to warzones or disaster zones to get a view on the ground, or spending weeks chasing down and investigating leads, or getting interviews with important people or leaks from insiders. In a good news organisation, that is what the paywall is paying for (no doubt there are many bad news organisations that try to charge you for low-effort rubbish - nothing new there).

A lot of significant news stories are broken by these reporters. If you get your news from independent blogs then I suspect either:

* they are rehashing the content from the paid journalists (which is fine, but not really a sustainable model if everyone does it)

* the news is not all that thoroughly researched

* the person actually has put a lot of time and effort to deliver you in-depth news for free, in which case, you have to ask yourself why.

To be clear, I use paywalls as well, but it's not as simple as saying the tech is cheaper now so there should be no reason to ever pay for news. If no one in society paid for news we'd all be worse off.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#22

Post by gosub100 » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

NoboruWataya wrote: post #21

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

Quality reporting isn't free (I know, I sound like a paywall myself, but it's true). It involves people traveling to warzones or disaster zones to get a view on the ground, or spending weeks chasing down and investigating leads, or getting interviews with important people or leaks from insiders. In a good news organisation, that is what the paywall is paying for (no doubt there are many bad news organisations that tr…

I have an idea: how about advertisers pay for ads placed on the websites of news outlets that have quality reporting? And furthermore, how about those ads dont pop up unexpectedly, don't auto play movies, dont have gruesome, edgy, salacious, or insulting graphics or images? Just make an offer and if I'm interested, I'll click.

Any time I hear the debate about paywall vs content provider, they've never disambiguated whether it's greed for more money they are after (by participating in the ads arms-race) or whether they simply cannot be profitable by showing "normal" (aka late 1990's web) ads. I think that's telling.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#23

Post by J_Shelby_J » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

NoboruWataya wrote: post #21

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

Quality reporting isn't free (I know, I sound like a paywall myself, but it's true). It involves people traveling to warzones or disaster zones to get a view on the ground, or spending weeks chasing down and investigating leads, or getting interviews with important people or leaks from insiders. In a good news organisation, that is what the paywall is paying for (no doubt there are many bad news organisations that tr…

There just needs to be a better way to pay. I’d pay a dollar to read something interesting. I will not give them my CC though and sign up for something that’s a challenge to cancel.

I know this has been said a million times before, but it is what it is. And I do 100% agree with you.

One other thought I’ve had is that the comments on some of these news sites is worth the subscription cost on its own. For example the financial times comment section is top tier.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#24

Post by supriyo-biswas » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #22

NoboruWataya wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality reporting isn't free (I know, I sound like a paywall myself, but it's true). It involves people traveling to warzones or disaster zones to get a view on the ground, or spending weeks chasing down and investigating leads, or getting interviews with important people or leaks from insiders. In a good news organisation, that is what the paywall is paying for (no doubt there are many bad news organisations that tr…

I have an idea: how about advertisers pay for ads placed on the websites of news outlets that have quality reporting? And furthermore, how about those ads dont pop up unexpectedly, don't auto play movies, dont have gruesome, edgy, salacious, or insulting graphics or images? Just make an offer and if I'm interested, I'll click. Any time I hear the debate about paywall vs content provider, they've never disambiguated w…

There are ad networks that serve simple, lightweight ads, and yet when people install an ad blocker their revealed preference equates to refusing all ads, even when they do not have any of the negative characteristics you mention.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#25

Post by wcarss » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

NoboruWataya wrote: post #21

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

Quality reporting isn't free (I know, I sound like a paywall myself, but it's true). It involves people traveling to warzones or disaster zones to get a view on the ground, or spending weeks chasing down and investigating leads, or getting interviews with important people or leaks from insiders. In a good news organisation, that is what the paywall is paying for (no doubt there are many bad news organisations that tr…

I think the problem comes down to: I have no faith that any for-profit journalism institution presenting a paywall will perform like a good actor in return, because the well of advertisement and content for money has been poisoned for so long by so many bad actors that there can be no trust.

Cable promised that you paid it, so it would never have ads. At the movie theatre, you pay to get in, then pay $25 for sugarwater and corn, then sit through 25 minutes of advertisement.

Does the international-megacorp-owned newspaper that shut down all its local news teams really need my $6/month? Would they do good if I gave it to them? The horse is unfortunately kinda out the barn door here.

Not part of that group are smaller, intentionally local or mission driven, perhaps non-profit organizations, especially if they offer the news for free but then have a premium model that allows me to support them and get a non-essential frill. Those places are at least starting from a place of utility and trust, and I will reward them for it.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#26

Post by rchaud » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

> In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. [...] but I think we need more decentralized content creation.

We've had that for 20 years in commercial blogs. All they do is rehash the story published by the bigger sites, embed some tweets, and dump a bunch of their own links into their 250 word article.

We always come back to the real news sites because there's a reason the blogs are un-gated.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#27

Post by culi » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

bjord wrote: post #17

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

I honestly have a really hard time believing that the reason newspapers are so expensive to run these days is due to web hosting costs—I would imagine that most of their budget is spent on staffing (though I couldn't find a budget breakdown with a quick search, so I'm only guessing here). As a side question: what are you reading about that independent blogs consistently offer the same quality of reporting as major ne…

> I honestly have a really hard time believing that the reason newspapers are so expensive to run these days is due to web hosting costs

All those metrics and analytics and anti-adblock services can really add up. The largest assets on an average, e.g., NYTimes article are 2mb+ scripts; not images

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#28

Post by figmert » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:43 PM UTC

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #4

Does anyone know what if anything is substantively different between the original bypass paywalls[1] and bypass paywalls clean? The implication, obviously, is that the original is unclean. [1] https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Besides what the others said, the new clean one supports a whole host of additional websites, is updated more regularly, and generally works better. I think my biggest issue with the clean one is that it's not on any of the add-on/extension stores, and it's unclear why it was removed from the add-on/extension store.

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#29

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #16

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate. In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have th…

We're talking about journalism, not website hosting. You pay a reporter to find out about a story, the journalist writes up a story and puts it in their company's paper. Some stories are wire stories that everyone is allowed to copy, some stories are not.

You can report on a story that another news outlet covered, but you can't just copy+paste it into your blog, because Laws[1]. Doesn't matter how much money it cost or what your hosting provider is, there are things you can and can't do with "information".

Moreover, depending on a search engine to find you news is a lot like going to a news stand near your house to find news. It's only going to show you the news that has paid enough to get its information out there front and center. SEO today pretty much guarantees that the one with the most money wins.

[1] https://nytlicensing.com/republishing-reprints-and-newspaper...

Re: Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

#30

Post by RHSeeger » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 2:47 PM UTC

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #24

gosub100 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an idea: how about advertisers pay for ads placed on the websites of news outlets that have quality reporting? And furthermore, how about those ads dont pop up unexpectedly, don't auto play movies, dont have gruesome, edgy, salacious, or insulting graphics or images? Just make an offer and if I'm interested, I'll click. Any time I hear the debate about paywall vs content provider, they've never disambiguated w…

There are ad networks that serve simple, lightweight ads, and yet when people install an ad blocker their revealed preference equates to refusing all ads, even when they do not have any of the negative characteristics you mention.

A VERY high percentage of ads are obnoxious. And a high enough percentage of ads are outright dangerous. Given that, using an ad blocker to keep yourself safe is a pretty sane choice. Even for sites that _try_ to have safe, sane ads; they're all using an ad network, and _that_ could get compromised, resulting in a dangerous payload (it's certain not an unknown occurrence).

It's very hard to justify showing any ads.