So this is like Spotify for websites?
spotify without the free tier.
The free tier is what we already have.
Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your data." On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.
unless i'm horribly misunderstanding something, they bill you at a flat rate. they distribute the funds proportionately among the sites you visit based on the time you spend. either way, you're trading the tracking by ad networks for tracking by scroll.
okay, so i signed up for scroll to test it out:
When i'm signed in to scroll and i open an article on the atlantic, privacy badger tells me i'm being tracked by scroll and google analytics.
when i'm not signed in to scroll, privacy badger tells me i'm being tracked by twelve different trackers.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's been a bunch of similar initiatives, albeit more typically aggregating via a single app (Inkl, Pressreader etc). I've tried some in the past because I'd like to pay for news, but consider site subscriptions as deeply hostile to the www per se. But they all end up with the same problem - great early hope of accumulating more sources over time, which then doesn't happen. Standardised micropayments are the obvio…
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Apple News Plus isn't too bad. If you read a lot, it's pennies or less per article. Apple's added a good number of publications since it launched, and I get more value out of it than I used to. But it's still trying to find its sea legs.
I've had no Apple devices for a couple of years, but in Australia at least its newspaper coverage is pretty much limited to News Corp. That'd be a nonstarter for me. Though that's based on what I read during the Aus launch. It may have expanded since.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#34Off the shelf solution is just pulling you favorite news website's RSS feed and running it through a full text filtering service, if the publication don't already give you the full text feed from the get go.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#35I used to use a similar service called Blendle. It, too, promised ad-free news. But even though I have lots of credit in my account, I stopped using it for three reasons: 1. It had a very limited number of publications available. 2. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear political bias on the part of the cur…
I also was excited by the promise of Blendle and stopped using it, but for different reasons to you: the main way i consume news is by finding links to articles on twitter and reddit. with blendle, those links didn't take me to the "blendle version" of the article, but to the paywalled version, and there was no easy way to jump from the paywalled version to the blendle version. To see an article on blendle, i'd have to go out of my way to find it on blendle, and their browsing experience wasn't especially great.
Scroll looks really nice because you don't have to access the content through scroll. You're still on the original source, and you get the benefits of your Scroll subscription no matter how you found the article.
The downside here is that because Scroll isn't re-hosting the content, you're stuck reading it on the generally awful websites of the original publishers, which are only made marginally better by the lack of ads and trackers.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#36I use scroll as a way to read USA Today ad-free. Their content is pretty good. I also read Vox, The Atlantic, and Verge sometimes. It's nice to not have ads on these sites.
All of these sites also offer RSS feeds, by the way.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#37We tried this before and failed. It was a browser-extension called Sterling that would block ads on every site with a monthly subscription. Payment to sites would be based on the ratio of time spent across domains.
The problem isn't technical, it's that people just don't want to pay for general content. They might accept subs for netflix or spotify or specific newspapers but paying for "the internet" is still an unknown and unaccepted model. Until that changes, no amount of new apps are going to fix this.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#38I was really excited about Scroll when I first heard about it, but after I looked into it more I lost almost all interest. I was looking at it almost a month ago, so it may have changed a bit since then, but at the time, the main things were that: 1. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks, and 304 "SBNation blogs…
Why pay for the atlantic and pay for scroll when you can just pay for atlantic, or not, and read their RSS feed however you like w/o ads?
I don't know who the target audience of this product could be. There's probably 40 people on earth who fall in the venn diagram of not knowing about ad blockers, not knowing about RSS feeds, and willing to seek out a service like scroll for their 30-odd supported websites.
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any concretely troubling parts to the terms that you saw?
I am dubious that the "AS IS" warrenty clause can be enforced, as providing any kind of support or claim implies that you expect the product to function as advertised. Arbitration agreements trouble me, even though they are pervasive. In particular for a product that is trying to offer a better alternative to opaque tracking and advertising techniques it appears to be another way to hide wrongdoing. Hope this helps.
It does, thanks!
Re: Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blendle has them on a "pay for what you read" basis, that I really like
If blendle makes a chrome/ff extension that redirects you from the website to blendle it'd be perfect. Right now I have to go to the app and search for the article I want, and then the article doesn't show up in search, and then I give up.
even if blendle would just let you search for an actual URL, that'd be great.