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You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#71

Post by kazinator »

a2128 wrote: post #27
ReadCarlBarks wrote: post #2

Most sites use simple cookies or a localStorage entry to limit how many articles you can read in a month. You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin: * https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

I learned once of a quick workaround that's baffling - putting a dot at the end of the domain name (example.com/page becomes example.com./page) Apparently this usually still resolves to the same page but the browser treats it as a different domain with separate cookies and localStorage, so it would bypass the limit, but if you kept doing it then it'd probably accumulate free articles still and stop working

That kind of bug happens under the "everything is a string" software paradigm. Abstractions that have more than one string representation inadvertently end up treated as different.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#74

Post by Dylan16807 »

bsder wrote: post #24
itsoktocry wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot. I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to. But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all…

> Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Money handling is expensive . Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example. As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.

> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.

Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges.

Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#75

Post by joe_the_user »

yegle wrote: post #34

I was a happy user of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor until it got shutdown. The pricing was surprisingly low, $5/month can eliminate ads on most of the websites that I view, while the owner will not have a reduced ads revenue.

Wow, yes, I would have joined. I dreamed of such a thing but also had a theory why it could never be.

Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues. Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction prefered by their owners. In the US, most small towns have newspapers owned by the leading families. The paper is valuable to that family if it's being read by the locals and the paper making money is nice but secondary.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#76

Post by bsder »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #74
bsder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Money handling is expensive . Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example. As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.

> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges. Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges. Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.

A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow.

Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per year means that you need roughly $100 each in profit in order to support that programmer. A thousand transactions in a month means you need roughly $10 profit each to support that programmer. You need 10K transactions per month before you are at $1 profit per transaction to support your programmer.

How many businesses have ten thousand transactions a month? Not very bloody many. Basically, only the very top 50 out of 250K creators (0.02%!) on Patreon pass that mark. It's REALLY rare.

Sure, when you are at scale things are cheap. However, before then things are very expensive.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#77

Post by darby_nine »

kazinator wrote: post #71
a2128 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned once of a quick workaround that's baffling - putting a dot at the end of the domain name (example.com/page becomes example.com./page) Apparently this usually still resolves to the same page but the browser treats it as a different domain with separate cookies and localStorage, so it would bypass the limit, but if you kept doing it then it'd probably accumulate free articles still and stop working

That kind of bug happens under the "everything is a string" software paradigm. Abstractions that have more than one string representation inadvertently end up treated as different.

They are semantically different—one is a relative domain name, the other is distinct. I'm not sure how this impacts localstorage or cookies but it might.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#78

Post by CobrastanJorji »

joe_the_user wrote: post #75
yegle wrote: post #34

I was a happy user of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor until it got shutdown. The pricing was surprisingly low, $5/month can eliminate ads on most of the websites that I view, while the owner will not have a reduced ads revenue.

Wow, yes, I would have joined. I dreamed of such a thing but also had a theory why it could never be. Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues . Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction pre…

It's worse than that. Your theory is probably true for BAD content. Newspapers that exist to spread lies or just opinions that favor some narrative are primarily driven to get as many eyes on their cheap propaganda as possible. The whole point of propaganda is to show it to as many people as possible.

GOOD content, though, is expensive to make, and while the creators would absolutely love it if everyone read it, their primary need is the ability to keep producing it. There are fewer billionaires paying to keep them in business, and if there were, they'd mostly likely start falling into being the bad kind of content.

So you end up in this situation where all of the true, high qualify information is behind paywalls, and all the bullshit propaganda masquerading as information is freely available to all.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#79

Post by thyrsus »

joe_the_user wrote: post #75
yegle wrote: post #34

I was a happy user of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor until it got shutdown. The pricing was surprisingly low, $5/month can eliminate ads on most of the websites that I view, while the owner will not have a reduced ads revenue.

Wow, yes, I would have joined. I dreamed of such a thing but also had a theory why it could never be. Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues . Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction pre…

There was a trope five years ago that small town papers had become economically infeasible, e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/decline-of-newspapers-leaves-ma...

My own town (60,000+) lost its paper more than ten years ago.

Was that not the general experience?

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#80

Post by sunshowers »

cortesoft wrote: post #58
sunshowers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a string you can type in blind that bypasses HSTS. Works on Chromium browsers. I don't want to make to too easy to find so I won't say it here but you can look for it.

You really think HN readers can't find the interstitial bypass keyword? It shows up in the very first Google search for it, I am not sure who you think you are protecting. I also find it goes against the ethos of HN to try to prevent a user from controlling their own hardware... if I want to MITM myself, I should be able to.

I was more concerned about it becoming more prominent in Google search results but I was just having a moment, never mind :)
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