41–50 of 161 posts
https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.
People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.
I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.
But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site. There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought…
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site. How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or mo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of course.
They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies them for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you get a share for views
spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for ~99% of artists on it
Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.
E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.
Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.
Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.
This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s
Or, wait…
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers. ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed. People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin. I know there are…
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site. There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought…
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site. How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or mo…
For news? Two, I guess.
My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.