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

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

#31

Post by plagiarist »

wcarss wrote: post #25
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 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 sugarwat…

How is so much of the content just corporate or police press releases without any further research? How are so many publications willing to provide a pseudo-authorative platform for the worst people on the planet in their op eds?

Without even bringing up that I'd be paying for the privilege of having ads jammed in every three inches of scroll. I'm not paying a damn thing to help them spread bullshit as if it were news.

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

#32

Post by plagiarist »

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.

What about the negative characteristics they didn't yet mention? Do those also track us across all the websites and share all their information with Meta and Google?

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

#33

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

It has nothing to do with the cost of hosting or the technology aspect. Making high quality content, and especially journalistic investigation, is a full time job. It takes a lot of time and effort, as well as some money to do it.

That you can find repeats of the information with Google after somebody has made the time and effort to make it means nothing. The information wouldn't exist at all without the initial effort of somebody, and that person needs to get paid.

> Let's spread the information out more.

Okay, then volunteer your time to make important journalistic investigations.

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

#34

Post by gspencley »

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…

> Quality reporting isn't free

Quality reporting isn't common either. I check a few news sites now and again to find out what's going on in the world and the signal to noise ratio is abysmal. It's gotten to the point where, when something really major happens I often find out about it from other people first. Then I might hit the news sites to get more information but that information is usually pretty sparse.

I do agree with your point. We need good journalists, and we need good distribution channels and compensation for those journalists. At the same time, the necessity is becoming a bit more niche thanks to the Internet and social media. For global affairs, journalists are an absolute necessity. For things that happen locally ?

The age of smart phones and social media has created a situation where raw, unedited sources get uploaded in near realtime without click-baity headlines and spin-filled editorializing. Which calls into question of the necessity of mainstream news outlets for these types of stories. Typically you'll get many sources in one feed as well.

I don't have the answer. I don't want "quality journalists" to disappear. I'm also seeing less and less of what I can identify as "quality" journalists. Most seem to be independent and post on Substack or produce documentary films. The paywalled mainstream news outlets look more and more like tabloids each day.

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

#35

Post by carlosjobim »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #23
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…

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 f…

That's very doubtable. The people who won't pay for a one month subscription won't pay a dollar to read an article either. Then they'll say "Oh, it's such a hassle to provide my payment information for something that is just a dollar".

These paywalled magazines know the customers better than the customers themselves.

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

#36

Post by carlosjobim »

plagiarist wrote: post #31
wcarss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sugarwat…

How is so much of the content just corporate or police press releases without any further research? How are so many publications willing to provide a pseudo-authorative platform for the worst people on the planet in their op eds? Without even bringing up that I'd be paying for the privilege of having ads jammed in every three inches of scroll. I'm not paying a damn thing to help them spread bullshit as if it were new…

> How are so many publications willing to provide a pseudo-authorative platform for the worst people on the planet in their op eds?

That's because newspapers should be platforms of free speech. If an editor refuses to take in an op-ed from important people, no mater how horrible, hen he is no fi for he job. If newspaper readers don't want to read the opinion of their enemies, they're just dumb.

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

#37

Post by carlosjobim »

BillyTheMage wrote: post #2

Finally I'll be able to read posts on HN! I know it's "against the rules" or "uninteresting" or whatever to comment about this sort of thing on HN posts, but I'm getting real tired of 3/4 of the HN posts being paid bullshit I'm not allowed to read. Even the archived links people post in the comments are inaccessible because CloudFlare. I fail to see how paid articles adhere to the HN spirit of "interesting discussion…

> paid bullshit

Why do you want to read bullshit?

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

#38

Post by banku_brougham »

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's a whole genre of twitter post articles by the NYTimes that fail to credit the original work of the journalists at a local paper or NGO type of media service. So that phenomina can operate in reverse too

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

#39

Post by gxvwb »

markx2 wrote: post #15
shiroiuma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times, some helpful person posts a comment with a link to the same article, sans paywall, on archive.org.

And if they do not, use this bookmarklet javascript:void(open('https://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location)))

The archive.today method has always worked best for me. I made a Firefox Add-On to do it automatically for sites I encounter regularly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surmount/

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #23
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…

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 f…

[deleted]
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