Yes, there was a glorious past where almost no websites used popups asking you to subscribe to their newsletter, or limited your usage with a paywall, or had yo

Yes, there was a glorious past where almost no websites used popups asking you to subscribe to their newsletter, or limited your usage with a paywall, or had you jumping through hoops with VPNs to get another five free article before that paywall kicks in, and so on. That was just around the time where you still had that subscription for the dead-tree edition of the newspaper whose website so graciously allows you to read all articles. Or somebody else had that particular paid subscription, and you had one with that national magazine, also with a great website, that the other gal happens to enjoy reading. You didn't block ads quite that aggressively, back then. The extensions just didn't work that well at the time. There were quite a few hit-the-monkey flash ads blinking away and playing sounds, but your preferred quality publications were mostly ad-free at the time. They must have been doing it for the joy it brings to be journalisting away without any commercial considerations, whatsoever. You would gladly pay for good writing, but it just isn't happening anymore! Plus: why should you pay for reading the news when they all print stories on exactly the same events? Clearly, B copied the story from A, C got it from B, and A just repeated what C had written! Absolutely nobody did any work! Each newspaper should report on its own sets of news and facts, otherwise where is the art? Where is the creativity? Once you find some outlet that has acceptable quality, you will gladly start paying again. It's hard to say what "acceptable quality" means in this regard, but it is really just the bare minimum, what any student newspaper editor gets right, and it is so sad to see that among a few thousand newsrooms, not a single one manages to clear that low bar. Someone should write a story how unfortunate it is that in a group of tens of thousands of professional journalists, every single combination of <x> of them is below average. Yeah, okay, there's maybe one or two that do important, high-quality work. As soon as they fix the layout in Brave on Mandrake Linux, you will consider subscribing. Unless they ever publish anything by that girl writer again, the bi** with the issues, you know? Then, you'll cancel the subscription and go back to reading their website with archive.is.