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You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#101

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #59
ReadCarlBarks wrote: post #2

Most sites use simple cookies or a localStorage entry to limit how many articles you can read in a month. You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin: * https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

One can also disable Javascript for individual sites ("site settings"). Or use a client that does not implement cookies, localStorage or Javascript, like the original www browsers. I have been using these for decades. In the relatively rare case I have to use a popular, graphical browser distributed by an entity that collects users' data to support online ad services, on a network I do not control, I use Javascript s…

If I am reading HTML with hyperlinks, I use the "links" browser with some custom modifications.

Most times, I am making HTTP requests with TCP clients, not a browser. If I am using an HTTP client, I use tnftp with custom modifications, fetch, or some other small client I can easily modify. I use a localhost-bound TLS forward proxy. Thus I can use a wide assortment of old TCP and HTTP clients from years when software was less bloated. For example, I still use orginal netcat heavily on a daily basis.

When I retrieve HTML/JSON/CSV, I use small, simple UNIX filters I write myself to extract what I want and present it in a readable text-only format and/or insert it into a SQLite3 database. I like the sqlite3 text-only output formats.

Hitting a limit on the number of news articles I can read is not something I am personally familiar with, and I use the same news websites as the people who complain about this, hence I believe it is associated with the browsers they are using, not the websites.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#102

Post by exe34 »

lxgr wrote: post #42
exe34 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i suppose you could make a $10 donation to the site and they could give you free coupons for articles.

If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.

do clubs count as payment processors? do hotels/bars who keep a tab with pen and paper?

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#103

Post by amelius »

majormajor wrote: post #20
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a reasonable barometer for a lot of news is: will this be important or relevant in 1 month? If the answer is "no", then it's probably more entertainment than anything else. However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news. For certain…

Slicing economically (oversimplifying here and ignoring other certain types of vulnerable or feeling-under-attack groups) the people at the bottom and the people at the top don't generally need to worry about the news. The ones at the top will be fine either way. The ones at the bottom will continue to have to scrap along either way. It's the people in the middle who's level of comfort day-to-day could be most affect…

You mean the people who are at the edge between the bottom and the middle. Those people will be most affected by political events.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#104

Post by lxgr »

exe34 wrote: post #102
lxgr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.

do clubs count as payment processors? do hotels/bars who keep a tab with pen and paper?

I don't know what counts or doesn't count as a payment processor exactly in these states (GP brought that up, not me).

In any case, the tax status of a payment (donation or payment for goods/services received) would most likely be orthogonal to that, i.e. I don't think you could skirt any of these requirements just by saying you're taking donations.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#106

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #59
ReadCarlBarks wrote: post #2

Most sites use simple cookies or a localStorage entry to limit how many articles you can read in a month. You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin: * https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

One can also disable Javascript for individual sites ("site settings"). Or use a client that does not implement cookies, localStorage or Javascript, like the original www browsers. I have been using these for decades. In the relatively rare case I have to use a popular, graphical browser distributed by an entity that collects users' data to support online ad services, on a network I do not control, I use Javascript s…

Sometimes news stories or other page contents have no useful hyperlinks yet they are still presented as HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

I operate in textmode, no graphics. There are few benefits I get from the use of HTML without useful hyperlinks.

In such cases, using a browser is unecessary, overkill. I use a pager instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#108

Post by fragmede »

red_admiral wrote: post #96
fragmede wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too. We've not already tried blockchain for this. The rails are there, just a small matter of implementation. Everyone's too busy building shovel factories and not enough people are mining for gold to make a web3 micropayments product. I can, right now, buy $5 of solana on Coinbase, give you $0.05, with an inconsequential fee of $0.001 or so using Solana, and…

What would you say are the main barriers to adopting a solution like this more widely? More technical points I can think of: how fast do transactions get confirmed (If they have to wait 5 min to read a news article most people will go somewhere else)? If this becomes more popular, what stops processing fees from going up (I think this is a problem for BTC).

Too many damn choices. Too many shovel builders leading to a paradox of choice. So many different wallets, so many different coins. The larger community is so utterly totally fractured. Which is by design, if I don't like what you're doing, instead of working together, I can take my ball and go do my own thing. Decentralization is great, except it's not. And then there's whole cryptocurrency angle. In order to buy into this, you have to buy some cryptocurrency. Maybe with something that's actually useful people won't automatically tune you out when you say "crypto" these days, but that always seemed like an uphill battle to me.

Anyway, Phantom*, with Solana can do micropayments today, on mobile and desktop, it's just a small matter of coding and adoption. Transactions take 5 seconds, which isn't awesome, but is stomachable. Gas fees are fixed at 0.00015 SOL, which then varies with the exchange rate, but that's currently (Jun 2024) $0.02. This does mean it will go up as the price of SOL goes up, but, well, it's not 2016, so I don't know that anyone's expecting wild swings in the exchange rate. I am not a cryptocurrency economist though. (Nor a regular one, for that matter.)

The supported golden happy path for this is anybody who can buy Solana, which would include a US person with a Coinbase account, who's willing to install their Chrome extension. The problem is mobile. The platform I'd like to support is Safari on iOS with a Safari extension, so it's seamless, but that's not there yet. What's there is to install a new app and use that app to browse, which I guess isn't the worst thing.

That's all technical implementation details though, the real barrier to adoption is getting writers/authors to use this. You'd have to setup a medium/substack clone, get a bunch of content producers on it, and then get readers will appear. But once you're there, then anyone else can setup a clone and cut you out of the picture. In fact, that's the whole point, that in using Solana as the base currency, people aren't tied into your platform. So then what's the incentive for setting up the medium/substack clone if the whole point of your clone is that people don't need it. So there's no VC-level funding to build this thing because there's no VC-level payout, but you're out there competing with well funded firms for talent to build this thing.

* https://phantom.app/ (non-affiliated)

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