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Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? That's an entirely serious suggestion. I'm not arguing that what you're doing is illegal. I have all sorts of qual

Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? That's an entirely serious suggestion. I'm not arguing that what you're doing is illegal. I have all sorts of qualms with copyright and its enforcement myself. If I were "copyright czar", movies would get three years, and newspapers maybe a week. But if we wish for copyright-holders to respect the rights of internet users, it would seem to be a winning proposition to maybe not actively work against their attempts to find a compromise. And a "soft paywall" that allows you to read a dozen or so articles per month without subscription seems to be jus that: a compromise, and a reasonable one at that. What do you expect to be the long-term outcome of bypassing such mechanisms? I have trouble of thinking of anything but "soft paywalls" turning into "hard paywalls". Then, we'll be left with the maybe one or two publications we subscribe to. How can such an outcome be in anyone's interest? I know you can bypass these schemes. Yes, they are laughable. I know ads are sometimes annoying. I know large swaths of the press have earned your scorn because they, like, use the wrong JS framework. Or something. But I still don't understand this attitude that appears to go even further than just "I want it for free" to an almost gleeful appreciation of vandalism destroying the foundations of democratic societies.

hobs 8y ago
I have a few responses to this, but the most basic is: Please dont tell people what to do on their computers. If your business model is not supportable except by other people willfully hiding information on the client computer, your business model is not good. "Avoiding a paywall that's only half implemented" is not "the destruction of journalism."
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  You're willing to wage an awful lot on the proposition that there is another business model, even though both you as well as thousands of now-bancrupt publishers have failed to find it. Also: your own business model of "living" is just held up by the completely artificial rule of others not taking everything you own. Just because "it's on the internet" doesn't make "might is right" a true proposition.
  - hobs 8y ago
    I dont have a business model based on living as a general rule, or elsewise some people owe me some money :) And no, that's not a fair analogy, its me saying that if you tell me something, I am not beholden on your instructions to forget it. You simply have to use something as simple as a lock and key and I will be forever stopped from knowing the thing (in reality). All news orgs have this option, they simply want the cake and eat it too of working with popular search engines and also charge users for information that they effectively already have. If you want to operate a private service go for it, nobody is going to complain about it, and any unauthorized access will be met with scorn (at the least.) edit: also I am not just willing to wage failed business models all day - clinging to things that dont work isnt a way towards success.
  - pessimizer 8y ago
    > You're willing to wage an awful lot on the proposition that there is another business model, No, for a business model not to work doesn't mean that there has to be another business model that will allow you to run exactly the same business. If I need to fish with dynamite to make fishing in a particular area profitable, and dynamite becomes illegal, it's no one's responsibility to come up with another way I can fish.
kartan 8y ago
> Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? My two cents is that advertisement is what is killing journalism. YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences. Why is that? Because all that happens in the privacy of your own computer. Usually any newspaper that publicly have printed such bullshit in their pages will be dead. Public will react to it. What is different? Facebook, YouTube, etc. are personalized. You are shown what you are interested in without public accountability. Niche radical content gets a lot of views for its own controversial nature. Views and money. Who wants to investigate, hire good writers and expend the money that it takes to write a good article when you can hire some one without ethics for a fraction of the price and get as many or more views as radicalization grows? YouTube, Facebook and others say that they are not responsible of the content they offer. I think that it should be true for things like comments. But for the monetized content they are 100% responsible of incentivizing that radicalization and killing good journalism in the process.
- apostacy 8y ago
  > YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences. It is a myth that there is any problem with ads being shown on controversial videos. YouTube demonetizing select videos is nothing more than a way to strangle independent media and help gentrify their platform.
iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
Chabge is hard. You can fight it or you can embrace it. Sometimes embracing change requires letting go.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  You do realize this argument is so vacuous, it would apply to someone torching your house, right?
  - iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
    Simply because the words could be applied to another situation doesn’t mean no thought was put into them. So no, I do not realize that the argument is vacuous. I’ve simply stated that you can either fight change or embrace it. In this context I mean that many web users do not want to view their content with advertisements or be tracked through advertising. Attempting to force them to is to push against user behavior (fighting change). I don’t believe users will change their behavior if you try and force them to. I believe that by embracing the users behaviour we can learn how to make it work. I think that might require letting go of our predetermined notions of what “journalism” is and how it should be funded. I think we need to be more open to reviewing why people paid for journalism in the first place and how the need it fulfilled is met today.
- Veen 8y ago
  Harmful changes can and should be fought. Journalism plays a vital role in democracies. Journalism is expensive. Someone needs to pay for it.
  - iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
    “Harmful changes should be fought” - Harmful is a pretty context dependent word in this situation. “Journalism places a vital role in democracies” - what role is that? (I’m not disagreeing, I simply want to know your opinion). “Journalism is expensive” - does it need to be? Why is that? “Someone needs to pay for it” - This seems quite vacuous. If the thing is valuable then someone will likely pay for it (if they can be convinced of the value and it’s realized). It’s not readers who pay for it now though is it? It’s advertising companies since they buy the ads. We’re not asking people to pay for it we’re asking them to be visually and audibly distracted into buying products and services in return for journalism. Perhaps this is not a fair deal for many anymore?
liftbigweights 8y ago
> Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? If paywall is what is destroying journalism, maybe it's a useless and worthless enterprise to begin with. Especially with today's journalist spreading ideological poison rather than reporting news. Stop blaming technology for the problems of modern day journalism. > But I still don't understand this attitude that appears to go even further than just "I want it for free" to an almost gleeful appreciation of vandalism destroying the foundations of democratic societies. Journalism has never been one of the foundation of democratic societies. The united states and democracy itself existed far before journalist. How about you people get off your high horse and stop pretending you are better or more important than you really are? Frankly, journalism today is a net negative - causing racial/societal strife, pushing fake nonsense like campus rape culture, peddling conspiracies and rather than holding power to account, all journalism today is acting as mouthpieces for the power. Journalists and newspapers are free to get off the internet. Don't see why the internet has to change so that a few journalists can make money peddling poison to the masses. The news industry should adapt to the internet and not the other way around.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  > Journalism has never been one of the foundation of democratic societies. So I'm assuming the news of what the people you voted for get to you via... diffusion? > . The united states and democracy itself existed far before journalist. You should sue your school for the permanent damage they did. Both in terms of grammar as well as history. In any case: if journalism is so useless, why are you jumping through hoops to read it?
  - liftbigweights 8y ago
    > So I'm assuming the news of what the people you voted for get to you via... diffusion? Maybe. > You should sue your school for the permanent damage they did. Both in terms of grammar as well as history. Okay. You might want to read about US history yourself. Take a gander at yellow journalism also and the history of news and news companies. > In any case: if journalism is so useless, why are you jumping through hoops to read it? I'm not.
dvogel 8y ago
Multiple news orgs have stated in public that they don't care about paywalls bypassers because they put up the paywall to convert only the most amenable readers. This is very similar to the paper distribution model where an extreme minority of subscribers represented the majority of revenue, due to extreme discounts and other subsidies given to most readers.
- coffeefirst 8y ago
  That's true, but it's also on the assumption that the paywall adds just enough friction and reminds readers "you know, if you like this, eventually you might think about paying for it." Some will. Some won't. Automating the process by pretending to be Google means the user won't even see that friction or messaging. It's clever, but it breaks the premise.
  - jhasse 8y ago
    The friction is installing the addon.
fredsanford 8y ago
"Journalism" in the last oh.... 20 years or so, IMHO, is mostly regurgitation of press releases. Said regurgitators then use SEO to splatter their shit all over the search engines and then want you to pay to read it after crowding out other articles in the search engines. I find this to be shitty. After noticing this and a few other behavoirs, I'd suggest that "journalism" needs no help destroying itself... You behave as if you work for some web media company with a soft paywall.
cipherzero 8y ago
I’ve responded elsewhere in this thread but I’d like to discuss the double standard being applied. Have you ever been in a conversation where someone talks about something and you said “hey I read this cool article on that, let me send it to you?” If so, guess what - you were the search engine for that conversation. Should you then have access to view the non-paywalled content?
m-p-3 8y ago
Then these websites should block the ability of search engine crawlers from accessing their paywalled content, which is basically moving the content out of the clear web onto the deep web (which is not the dark web, there's a difference). If they can't accept that compromise and not have these paywalled articles indexed, then the problem is on them.
- Zak 8y ago
  They can even have a summary or introductory paragraph indexed while designing a paywall that way. What they can't have is search engines able to read the whole article and not everyone else. I think this is fair, and so do the search engines. Google calls doing otherwise "cloaking" and says they penalize the ranking of sites that do it. Perhaps they're not doing so effectively enough.

hobs 8y ago

I have a few responses to this, but the most basic is: Please dont tell people what to do on their computers. If your business model is not supportable except by other people willfully hiding information on the client computer, your business model is not good. "Avoiding a paywall that's only half implemented" is not "the destruction of journalism."

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
You're willing to wage an awful lot on the proposition that there is another business model, even though both you as well as thousands of now-bancrupt publishers have failed to find it. Also: your own business model of "living" is just held up by the completely artificial rule of others not taking everything you own. Just because "it's on the internet" doesn't make "might is right" a true proposition.
- hobs 8y ago
  I dont have a business model based on living as a general rule, or elsewise some people owe me some money :) And no, that's not a fair analogy, its me saying that if you tell me something, I am not beholden on your instructions to forget it. You simply have to use something as simple as a lock and key and I will be forever stopped from knowing the thing (in reality). All news orgs have this option, they simply want the cake and eat it too of working with popular search engines and also charge users for information that they effectively already have. If you want to operate a private service go for it, nobody is going to complain about it, and any unauthorized access will be met with scorn (at the least.) edit: also I am not just willing to wage failed business models all day - clinging to things that dont work isnt a way towards success.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  > You're willing to wage an awful lot on the proposition that there is another business model, No, for a business model not to work doesn't mean that there has to be another business model that will allow you to run exactly the same business. If I need to fish with dynamite to make fishing in a particular area profitable, and dynamite becomes illegal, it's no one's responsibility to come up with another way I can fish.

kartan 8y ago

> Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? My two cents is that advertisement is what is killing journalism. YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences. Why is that? Because all that happens in the privacy of your own computer. Usually any newspaper that publicly have printed such bullshit in their pages will be dead. Public will react to it. What is different? Facebook, YouTube, etc. are personalized. You are shown what you are interested in without public accountability. Niche radical content gets a lot of views for its own controversial nature. Views and money. Who wants to investigate, hire good writers and expend the money that it takes to write a good article when you can hire some one without ethics for a fraction of the price and get as many or more views as radicalization grows? YouTube, Facebook and others say that they are not responsible of the content they offer. I think that it should be true for things like comments. But for the monetized content they are 100% responsible of incentivizing that radicalization and killing good journalism in the process.

apostacy 8y ago
> YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences. It is a myth that there is any problem with ads being shown on controversial videos. YouTube demonetizing select videos is nothing more than a way to strangle independent media and help gentrify their platform.

iovrthoughtthis 8y ago

Chabge is hard. You can fight it or you can embrace it. Sometimes embracing change requires letting go.

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
You do realize this argument is so vacuous, it would apply to someone torching your house, right?
- iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
  Simply because the words could be applied to another situation doesn’t mean no thought was put into them. So no, I do not realize that the argument is vacuous. I’ve simply stated that you can either fight change or embrace it. In this context I mean that many web users do not want to view their content with advertisements or be tracked through advertising. Attempting to force them to is to push against user behavior (fighting change). I don’t believe users will change their behavior if you try and force them to. I believe that by embracing the users behaviour we can learn how to make it work. I think that might require letting go of our predetermined notions of what “journalism” is and how it should be funded. I think we need to be more open to reviewing why people paid for journalism in the first place and how the need it fulfilled is met today.
Veen 8y ago
Harmful changes can and should be fought. Journalism plays a vital role in democracies. Journalism is expensive. Someone needs to pay for it.
- iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
  “Harmful changes should be fought” - Harmful is a pretty context dependent word in this situation. “Journalism places a vital role in democracies” - what role is that? (I’m not disagreeing, I simply want to know your opinion). “Journalism is expensive” - does it need to be? Why is that? “Someone needs to pay for it” - This seems quite vacuous. If the thing is valuable then someone will likely pay for it (if they can be convinced of the value and it’s realized). It’s not readers who pay for it now though is it? It’s advertising companies since they buy the ads. We’re not asking people to pay for it we’re asking them to be visually and audibly distracted into buying products and services in return for journalism. Perhaps this is not a fair deal for many anymore?

liftbigweights 8y ago

> Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? If paywall is what is destroying journalism, maybe it's a useless and worthless enterprise to begin with. Especially with today's journalist spreading ideological poison rather than reporting news. Stop blaming technology for the problems of modern day journalism. > But I still don't understand this attitude that appears to go even further than just "I want it for free" to an almost gleeful appreciation of vandalism destroying the foundations of democratic societies. Journalism has never been one of the foundation of democratic societies. The united states and democracy itself existed far before journalist. How about you people get off your high horse and stop pretending you are better or more important than you really are? Frankly, journalism today is a net negative - causing racial/societal strife, pushing fake nonsense like campus rape culture, peddling conspiracies and rather than holding power to account, all journalism today is acting as mouthpieces for the power. Journalists and newspapers are free to get off the internet. Don't see why the internet has to change so that a few journalists can make money peddling poison to the masses. The news industry should adapt to the internet and not the other way around.

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
> Journalism has never been one of the foundation of democratic societies. So I'm assuming the news of what the people you voted for get to you via... diffusion? > . The united states and democracy itself existed far before journalist. You should sue your school for the permanent damage they did. Both in terms of grammar as well as history. In any case: if journalism is so useless, why are you jumping through hoops to read it?
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  > So I'm assuming the news of what the people you voted for get to you via... diffusion? Maybe. > You should sue your school for the permanent damage they did. Both in terms of grammar as well as history. Okay. You might want to read about US history yourself. Take a gander at yellow journalism also and the history of news and news companies. > In any case: if journalism is so useless, why are you jumping through hoops to read it? I'm not.

dvogel 8y ago

Multiple news orgs have stated in public that they don't care about paywalls bypassers because they put up the paywall to convert only the most amenable readers. This is very similar to the paper distribution model where an extreme minority of subscribers represented the majority of revenue, due to extreme discounts and other subsidies given to most readers.

coffeefirst 8y ago
That's true, but it's also on the assumption that the paywall adds just enough friction and reminds readers "you know, if you like this, eventually you might think about paying for it." Some will. Some won't. Automating the process by pretending to be Google means the user won't even see that friction or messaging. It's clever, but it breaks the premise.
- jhasse 8y ago
  The friction is installing the addon.

fredsanford 8y ago

"Journalism" in the last oh.... 20 years or so, IMHO, is mostly regurgitation of press releases. Said regurgitators then use SEO to splatter their shit all over the search engines and then want you to pay to read it after crowding out other articles in the search engines. I find this to be shitty. After noticing this and a few other behavoirs, I'd suggest that "journalism" needs no help destroying itself... You behave as if you work for some web media company with a soft paywall.

cipherzero 8y ago

I’ve responded elsewhere in this thread but I’d like to discuss the double standard being applied. Have you ever been in a conversation where someone talks about something and you said “hey I read this cool article on that, let me send it to you?” If so, guess what - you were the search engine for that conversation. Should you then have access to view the non-paywalled content?

m-p-3 8y ago

Then these websites should block the ability of search engine crawlers from accessing their paywalled content, which is basically moving the content out of the clear web onto the deep web (which is not the dark web, there's a difference). If they can't accept that compromise and not have these paywalled articles indexed, then the problem is on them.

Zak 8y ago
They can even have a summary or introductory paragraph indexed while designing a paywall that way. What they can't have is search engines able to read the whole article and not everyone else. I think this is fair, and so do the search engines. Google calls doing otherwise "cloaking" and says they penalize the ranking of sites that do it. Perhaps they're not doing so effectively enough.