Jeremy,
Useful plugin but BLAH chrome! Any chance you will port this to Firefox?
Wait, Google Sent Me
91–100 of 246 posts
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#92Disappointed in you Jeremy. Its fair for many here to complain about some of the online advertising practices of publishers. However the viable alternative it to pivot to some form of subscription model. Its a hard transition and many orgs are making risky changes to do better. Extensions like these are a step backwards. If you value the work you should support it. See bio for usual disclaimers
The paywall model is currently broken:
* not culturally integrated the way we don't mind paying for smartphone apps;
* not atomic enough (we want to pay cents for an article, not dollars for a website, nor tens of dollars for a long-term subscription);
* it raises convenience and trust issues;
* it competes against ad-based models, which adblockers have failed to bankrupt until now;
* paywall sites aren't taken into account properly by Google et al.
Relieving pressure from the currently broken paywall model won't help fix it. Making the situation untenable is the only way to make it change. The most effective move would be to kill ads as a business model. Of course, don't expect Google, an advertising agency, to help us do that. And how to pay author while keeping Internet searchable remains an open problem AFAIK.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#93Interesting. I posted a Chrome extension that did the same thing a while back (WSJ specific) and HN unanimously told me I was in the wrong, so I took it down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109987 This time the comments seem to be mostly positive.
Apparently having a few javascript frameworks under your belt can put you on the right side of the law.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see you wrote a Chrome extension that cuts most of the ads from NYT.
Yes. My guess is you're leaving that statement hanging to make a larger point? If so I'd love to add that I'm annoyed by some of the tactics and lengths that publishers go to to monetize content ad the expense of user-experience and other costs. The only path right now are ads, 'sponsored content', 'native units'. I would much rather we have a subscription-based model that generated enough revenue to ween them off aw…
I support subscription content. But you can't have your cake and eat it too -- in other words, you can't put content behind a paywall and also have it publicly indexed by search engines.
Remove the trick where it's okay for Google searches to circumvent the paywall and this extension becomes useless.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did someone make a Firefox version yet?
For sites that has x free articles/month, I just discovered Private Tab[1] which makes it easy to turn an existing tab private or force a bookmark to always open in a private tab. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/private-tab/
Self-Destructing cookies extension also keeps the read count at 0 after you close the tab. As an added bonus the extension should also help prevent you from being tracked across the web by various advertising/state agencies.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#96It would be nice if Google could make some of the Chrome permissions a bit more fine-grained. This one needs to "read and change your data on all websites", but with a better extensions architecture could be something much less scary like "read and change your data on the current website whenever you click the extension's icon".
The issue is that if it can modify one page, it can use that to inject code to request data from any web site. Those requests will contain your cookies for those sites so your data can be revealed.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#97Interesting. I posted a Chrome extension that did the same thing a while back (WSJ specific) and HN unanimously told me I was in the wrong, so I took it down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109987 This time the comments seem to be mostly positive.
Apparently having a few javascript frameworks under your belt can put you on the right side of the law.
Now there's a stinging criticism of HN.
Sorry habosa. You're not popular enough to do disruptive things.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#98Interesting. I posted a Chrome extension that did the same thing a while back (WSJ specific) and HN unanimously told me I was in the wrong, so I took it down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109987 This time the comments seem to be mostly positive.
Wow, those comments are really odd. Every time a WSJ article is submitted here a comment contains a link to avoid the paywall, and every single time people are grateful.
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently having a few javascript frameworks under your belt can put you on the right side of the law.
Now there's a stinging criticism of HN. Sorry habosa. You're not popular enough to do disruptive things.
Too true. I'd love to see what Hacker News comments would look like if all comments were anonymous for the first 6 hours...
Re: Wait, Google Sent Me
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did someone make a Firefox version yet?
You can achieve the same thing with the RefControl add-on, which allows you to set a custom referrer for a particular site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol
Fantastic tip. For anyone interested in trying this out, use http://news.google.com as the "custom" referer.
Screenshots and help here: http://www.renjusblog.com/2010/01/hack-read-wall-street-onli...