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F*** Paywalls

1ft.io

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61–70 of 92 posts

Re: F*** Paywalls

#61

Post by luoc »

zeta0134 wrote: post #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. Basica…

I like that!

Another thing that bothers me is that I have to subscribe to all pages separately and that the price of the individual venues is just too high. News are too important to lock in with one or maybe two providers, sorry.

Take, for instance, Urban Sports Club where I have a number of plans and for amount X I get, let's say, unlimited gym, 2x sauna and a yoga session per month at their partners. Why not having this for news and other media? Like paying 50€ and you get 25 articles at partnering news sites, 10 hours Spotify and 5 hours Youtube premium.

The flaw with all this is that it is lacking the lock-in effect and let's be honest, competition is only cool if you're not exposed to it ;)

Re: F*** Paywalls

#62

Post by high_5 »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #14

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?

There's still too much of friction in current payment systems to be dealt with (along with subscription models) vs. ad model. And I guess it's also telling of the actual worth of the news and opinions. We just consume too much inactionable information, mostly to entertain or distract ourselves.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#63

Post by mostlylurks »

insanitybit wrote: post #4

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.

Those are far from the only options available. Recently platforms such as patreon have shown that it is completely feasible for a small subset of enthusiastic fans to financially support some creator that makes their content freely available to anyone with an internet connection. And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time, so acting like those people don't exist in spades just because a bunch of rent-seeking content farms have entered the field in recent years is ludicrous.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#64

Post by 8chanAnon »

jimaek wrote: post #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

That would need to involve more than the DNS. The browser expects to see the certificate for a specific website so you can't just redirect. The certificate needs to be forged. I don't think that is doable without a personal proxy server. In some cases, the browser may allow you to accept an invalid certificate but many sites forbid that via the HTTP Strict Transport Security mechanism. So you will need a proxy server plus a self-signed certificate authority installed in the browser or operating system.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#65

Post by scumola »

zeta0134 wrote: post #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. Basica…

Articles are shared so quickly nowadays, the 'making it public when they get enough tips' might not happen fast enough and it'd be the same experience for most people...

Re: F*** Paywalls

#66

Post by high_5 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #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. Basica…

I just saw an interesting model on Substack: pay to comment. That might weed out the spammers and trolls quite effectively and build up a community of truly interested parties that have something to contribute.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#68

Post by 8chanAnon »

Nextgrid wrote: post #50
jimaek wrote: post #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

A service could work but would need to work around TLS. It would either need to provide you a root CA certificate to install on your systems (bad idea as it would allow them to MITM any website), or a bundle of certificates for the hostnames of the news websites they support (so the MITM is constrained to those domains, but that's fine as that's your intention anyway).

A responsible developer should never supply a pre-configured certificate (though many do exactly that). An unique certificate should be created for the specific installation.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#69

Post by swader999 »

vodou wrote: post #37
swader999 wrote: post #11

The craziest is paying for state propaganda. Hard no.

Can you give one example of state propaganda that is behind paywall?

Others have in reply. See mocking bird, almost all are influenced by state.

The other factor is corporate influence. Most of the media is owned by the add dollars that drive it, so it's not the truth, often its what helps or at least doesn't harm the Corp that passes the filters.

Re: F*** Paywalls

#70

Post by DanAtC »

dageshi wrote: post #40
not_your_vase wrote: post #20

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

This, but non-sarcastically.
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