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F*** Paywalls

1ft.io

31–40 of 92 posts

Re: F*** Paywalls

#31
Here's a thought... Why not let the paying subscribers promote content they especially like to the commons?

So, if you're a paying member, you get to read everything like it works today. But you also get a steady flow of tips. If you like an article, you can tip the author directly, which comes out of your monthly subscription. Once a given article gets enough tips, it's permanently unlocked for every visitor.

Basically, good quality content goes public, letting the readers both curate the content and help out those for whom a full subscription is not in the budget.

Thoughts?

Re: F*** Paywalls

#32
post #25

lol what do people expect? You say you want a web without ads, now you want a web without paywalls. Sorry, but... pick one. Or watch as the internet collapses.

The fundamental problem is that you can't unread an article if you don't like it, and get your money back.

You can block the source in many apps so you don’t see it again.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#33

We don't want to pay and we don't want to watch ads - still, we want to consume the content. I mean, I get the sentiment, I also share it to a great degree. But how are websites supposed to stay afloat?

Moreover we don't want to use big payment processors and we don't want crypto.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#34
post #18

How does the tech work? How do they bypass the paywall?

Looks like they use some sort of proxy:

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%...

Typically news sites rate limit how much a particular IP can be used to read articles. I assume the proxy IP is different each time.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#35

20 years of World Wide Web and we still don't have micropayments so we can just pay a penny to read an article. Why does it take us so long?

I don’t think the economics of that would work for big publications. Maybe at 5-10 cents per article they would.

[deleted]

Re: F*** Paywalls

#36
Is there a service like this that could work on a DNS level?

I'm using a DNS ad blocker and I could set-up overrides of certain news websites to a different hostname which in turn would redirect to the bypass URL.

It sounds doable but I haven't seen anything like that

Re: F*** Paywalls

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, just like I expect to get paid for my work. I want a simple way to pay for all the pay walls in aggregate so I'm not signing up for 27 different subscriptions and I read one article from each source. I'm not against paying, I'm against a huge pile of bullshit management.

How do you feel about Apple news, or similar aggregators?

[deleted]

Re: F*** Paywalls

#40

We don't want to pay and we don't want to watch ads - still, we want to consume the content. I mean, I get the sentiment, I also share it to a great degree. But how are websites supposed to stay afloat?

Ahh ahh! I know this one! I've read enough HN comments to know the answer.

1) Anything that was done for monetary gain on the internet was inherently bad and it's no loss if it goes away

2) People will just magically decide to keep creating content out of the goodness of their own hearts

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