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Ask HN: What do you do with paywalled HN articles?
I read HN everyday. There's often articles on the front page from NY Times, WSJ, Bloomberg, The Economist, etc. that are paywalled. When I get to the sites I can only read the first paragraph of the article. Sometimes incognito works but not always so I just give up and am kind of frustrated that I couldn't read it. I have a subscription to the Washington Post app that I use for everyday news but I don't want to pay a monthly subscription for every single major publication.
I tried Apple News+ but I'm not crazy about it and it's pretty walled in.
Is this a shared frustration? What do you typically do?
- btown 7y agooutline.com is an amazing tool. Prepend it to most URLs (e.g. outline.com/https...) and it gets you through. (Mods - my apologies if this isn’t kosher to share, feel free to remove.)
- adamlangsner 7y agoThanks! I actually just learned a bout that tool a minute a go from this medium article about how to bypass paywalls: https://medium.com/black-edge-consulting/how-to-bypass-virtually-every-news-paywall-705602c4c2ce https://medium.com/black-edge-consulting/how-to-bypass-virtu... which ironically is paywalled. There's also a firefox extension that requests the site from a different country thus getting rid of the paywall. All this stuff is ethically and legally dubious. I wish there was like a spotify for news.
- mtmail 7y agoFor medium.com paywall try https://github.com/swapagarwal/mediumship https://github.com/swapagarwal/mediumship
- adamlangsner 7y agoThanks will do. I have found that if I log out of medium account or go incognito I can read all their paywalled articles for free.
- ElFitz 7y agoPretty much like Apple's News+, but with more newspapers?
- adamlangsner 7y agoYeah and multi platform. Obviously Apple news+ is inherently limited to the Apple ecosystem
- pwg 7y ago> What do you typically do? Close the browser tab when a paywall appears.
- adamlangsner 7y agoI usually give up. I just don't read the article. I read the first paragraph that's visible above the subscription CTA and then I go back to binging on whatever else is on HN
- duxup 7y agoI'm happy to subscribe digitally to NYT and a couple other news sources (some with walls, some not).
- neonate 7y agoMany can be read via http://archive.is http://archive.is or https://archive.org https://archive.org. I usually look there, and if I find a readable version I come back here and post the link for others.
- alpha-oliveira 7y agoHow do you read the New York Times in archive.org?
- HNLurker2 7y agoFor a while NYT was able to be paywall using Facebook redirect ;)
- neonate 7y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... then https://web.archive.org/web/20190701220022/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190701220022/https://www.nytim...
- davidjnelson 7y agoSometimes disabling JavaScript via a browser extension can help. Not always though.
- m-p-3 7y agoI use this: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox Or I send it to Outline or Pocket.
- koala_man 7y agoI hit the "web" link under the title, click the first hit on the Google search, and read it without a paywall.
- if_by_whisky 7y agoI use a chrome extension to bypass paywalls
- rmellow 7y agoI consciously refuse to consume it. HN used to be better at avoiding paywalled articles, but it's become increasingly common in the last year (source: myself, consuming it since 2011).
- react_burger38 7y agoI use Brave browser's script and cookie blocking abilities. In the browser, you click on the Brave logo to the right of the url input. In the menu that appears, you can block all scripts and cookies. This is usually enough for me to see NYT, WaPo, Economist, and other articles. Only in rare cases has this strategy not worked. I consume a lot of news, so whenever I see a paywall -- boom! Scripts blocked, paywall goes down. It seems that it remembers these settings on a site-by-site basis, as well. I encounter fewer paywalls as time goes by.
- natch 7y agoI refuse to pay for most sites since they tend to offer little value and/or use dark patterns such as barely disclosed trial periods. Even high value sites like NYT, I refuse to pay for because of their semi-deceptive trial periods but just as importantly their remarkably high pricing after the trial. After using up the few trial articles for a given month I just don't read from that site. Maybe two or three times a year total I might go to extremes like firing up a different browser to try to load a story with a fresh session, if it's something I really want to read. I do pay decent money for some valuable sites that offer good content. And I end up paying even in months when I don't consume their content, and I don't mind, because I like supporting the site and I can go back any time with full access (as long as I am subscribed) and get any content I missed. This tends to be more tech how-to stuff, as opposed to news. Like NSScreenCast and objc.io, which are both great in different ways. And their pricing is not insane for what they offer. It's fair. Unlike the news sites, which have utterly crazy pricing if you do a quick calculation of how much it would cost you to subscribe to a dozen or so of them. I dip into way more than several dozen news sites that want me to pay. No way I could make the budget fit even a small subset of them, at the prices they want.
- c22 7y agoI read the comments on HN. Usually I can glean enough of an outline of the article that I don't feel like I have to read it. If I am compelled to check it out anyway (most likely because there are few comments and the title is very baitey) I'll try incognito mode or occasionally check the web link/google cache. But if it's not easy I just move on.
- flensortow 7y agoI pay for NYT and WaPo, so I have no issues with these. It is frustrating though that despite many alternative sources available there seems (from my perspective) to be a really large number of low-added-value postings of Bloomberg articles. I can usually search for the subject or some content from the first paragraph and find alternative stories about the same topic and read those instead.
- duxup 7y agoI get the feeling Bloomberg just lets anyone post there....it feels like medium sometimes.
- ConcernedCoder 7y agoI hit the back button
- yspeak 7y agoUse disable JavaScript plugin Firefox mobile for Android for but and a few others ( usually the ones that limit free articles to set number). Does not work for wsj but I have a subscription for that. I believe wsj only works for sponsored Facebook shares if you are not a subscriber. Irks me they do not let subscribers share articles to others, they used to.
- envolt 7y agoIf the site offers 2-3 free articles to read, then I'm good. Otherwise I just back out. If my 2-3 article trial is over, I just open on Private mode or Temporary Tab extension on Firefox.
- buboard 7y agoMost of the time there is not even a reason for a paywall, as the same report can be found in other media for free. HN should have a policy to not allow paywalls unless there is no alternative.
- zzo38computer 7y agoIf I cannot access it, then I will just not read it. Although sometimes there are comments that I might read and maybe also reply to, even though since I have not read the article I could not properly comment on the article itself.