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Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#111

Post by brnt »

ivann wrote: post #106
brnt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability is solved by being on the Mozilla AddOn store. Besides, not everybody cares about discoverability.

But it was removed from AMO. That was an issue as people that installed it from AMO just stopped receiving updates silently. You had to uninstall it and re-install the gitlab version for the auto-update to work again.

Hmm, didn't catch that. I see there's still _a_ Bypass add-on on Mozilla. There always were a few, and close forks last I bothered to check. Is this different?

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#112

Post by ivann »

brnt wrote: post #111
ivann wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it was removed from AMO. That was an issue as people that installed it from AMO just stopped receiving updates silently. You had to uninstall it and re-install the gitlab version for the auto-update to work again.

Hmm, didn't catch that. I see there's still _a_ Bypass add-on on Mozilla. There always were a few, and close forks last I bothered to check. Is this different?

There are some but with very few users and limited to a small number of sites. The only one still on AMO that comes close is the one by iamadamdev (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...) which is discussed here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40016918

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#113

Post by zeta0134 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #105
CM30 wrote: post #46

Seems like Gitlab seems to be even more ridiculous with their responses to large businesses and potentially dubious copyright claims than GitHub is. It's not the only time this month I've seen them take down repositories related to projects that some large company wanted removed despite it not necessarily being illegal in any way.

Yeah this is not a DMCA thing, there is nothing copyrighted in the code. The core problem is the newspapers wanting their cake and eat it. They want those sweet google hits but they don't want to give their articles to readers without payment. So there's always a way around it if you can manage to fake a google spider. For me the current model is so broken. I end up on lots of different newspaper sites. But no, I'm n…

The trouble is that the ideal model (newspapers on the whole used to cost, like, 0.25c) is extremely tricky in the online space, because payments are high friction and small payments especially are not really economically viable. I'm not sure what solution could possibly exist that wouldn't involve some hyper-common payment provider building out a service to solve this specific thing, and then getting all the online news sites to agree to use it, and then getting most visitors to accept "I need to spend less than a dollar if I want to read this article" as normal and okay.

It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.

But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#114

Post by bdw5204 »

bsder wrote: post #70
bubblethink wrote: post #65

Why was this hosted on gitlab.com ? If you're not on github, the discoverablity is pretty low. You are not self hosting. There is no upside for a project like this to be on gitlab.com. If you're already taking the hit of not being mainstream, why not self host in a sane country ?

1) There are lots of reasons to avoid Github and they are all spelled Microsoft. 2) Putting something on Gitlab means that there is one level of activation energy between idiots trying to pad out some corporate "social goodwill" number by "fixing" things on your project. If I ever had to open-source anything, I would host it somewhere else and mirror a read-only repo to github.

I've never experienced the latter but if somebody wants to waste their time sending me unwanted pull requests I can just ignore them.

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#116

Post by timbit42 »

ivann wrote: post #106
brnt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability is solved by being on the Mozilla AddOn store. Besides, not everybody cares about discoverability.

But it was removed from AMO. That was an issue as people that installed it from AMO just stopped receiving updates silently. You had to uninstall it and re-install the gitlab version for the auto-update to work again.

It was removed from AMO after it was already on the site. Maybe they didn't want to move it.

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#117

Post by philwelch »

speedgoose wrote: post #95
philwelch wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the attitude that has ruined the entire web. The real question should be: why is JavaScript necessary and what does it add? (In the majority of applications, absolutely nothing.)

It adds interactivity and dynamic features that would be pretty slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS.

That’s nice I guess, but these should be progressive enhancements and the page should still work without JavaScript enabled.

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#118

Post by deanishe »

speedgoose wrote: post #95
philwelch wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the attitude that has ruined the entire web. The real question should be: why is JavaScript necessary and what does it add? (In the majority of applications, absolutely nothing.)

It adds interactivity and dynamic features that would be pretty slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS.

> pretty slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS

That's the heart of it, isn't it? It's challenging.

At the core of modern web development is the attitude that developer convenience trumps all.

The software is free after all. (The thousands you pay in bandwidth and hardware upgrade costs to keep running their bloatware doesn't count because none of that goes to the web developer, and is therefore irrelevant in their it's-all-about-me worldview.)

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#119

Post by semolino »

zeta0134 wrote: post #113
wkat4242 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is not a DMCA thing, there is nothing copyrighted in the code. The core problem is the newspapers wanting their cake and eat it. They want those sweet google hits but they don't want to give their articles to readers without payment. So there's always a way around it if you can manage to fake a google spider. For me the current model is so broken. I end up on lots of different newspaper sites. But no, I'm n…

The trouble is that the ideal model (newspapers on the whole used to cost, like, 0.25c) is extremely tricky in the online space, because payments are high friction and small payments especially are not really economically viable. I'm not sure what solution could possibly exist that wouldn't involve some hyper-common payment provider building out a service to solve this specific thing, and then getting all the online…

The ideal model IMO would be P2P micropayments (hopefully a web standard implemented as a browser API), where the payment processor middleman is cut out, so small transactions become viable. Patreon allowing you to bundle and only be charged once for your handful of monthly subscriptions was a good half-measure and a great way to reduce the middleman's cut, but since its elimination, we're back to square one. It doesn't seem realistic to entrust an omnipresent payment provider with this, since they'll always collect a fixed amount of overhead per transaction, which will intrinsicially disincentivize smaller individual payments. But maybe I'm being overly paranoid in some aspects and naïve in others.

Re: Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

#120

Post by MasterIQ »

xk_id wrote: post #91
speedgoose wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have to make their interface work without JavaScript? The few people who block JavaScript for sure know how to enable JavaScript again. And if they block JavaScript for security and trust reasons, well, they are going to download software from gitlab and run it anyway.

Delivering STATIC DOCUMENTS via dynamic javascript apps running on top of http is the quintessential caricature of overengineering.

    Over-engineering indeed, but it does address actual problems.
    Primarily: Addressing what most browsers haven't well managed to handle: interaction with big files.
    E.g. huge database-like Plain Text: browsers typically fail with OOM (Out of Memory).

    I'll write a review of GitHub's delivery infrastructure when I have the time.
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