6 ms·

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

216 points by ohjeez 2y ago

ReadCarlBarks 2y ago
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://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-scripting https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  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 the $2.50 or $5.00 subs? I feel like we anchor to $10 because it's a nice easy number, but the average person just can't afford very many of these, and no single subscription is good enough. So we sustain our desire to not pay for anything.
  - rectang 2y ago
    I'm willing to sign up for some cheap subscriptions through Apple that I'd be unlikely to make directly because I don't have the energy to scrutinize individual vendors regarding hidden charges, dark patterns, data collection, security breaches, etc. I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.
    - dandandan 2y ago
      Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.
  - paulddraper 2y ago
    It went the same way as a $5 lunch.
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    Blogger siderea has talked about this a lot in relation to patreon, and the challenges for any platform wanting to replace it. EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform. Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs. EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.
    - exe34 2y ago
      i suppose you could make a $10 donation to the site and they could give you free coupons for articles.
      - adolph 2y ago
        The coupons could be on a cryptographic ledger so you have access to it from mobile/desktop/family members and any article could ask for payment from it or maybe different pricing for different sales funnel entry points. I think this is what Brave browser has set up, but I havnt been motivated enough to inquire.
        lxgr 2y ago
        Or they could just be… in a regular old database of the issuer, who is the one that will validate them anyway when you redeem them for articles?
      - lxgr 2y ago
        If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.
        2y ago
  - bsder 2y ago
    > 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.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > 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.
      - bsder 2y ago
        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.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor. And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer. If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.
  - erkt 2y ago
    Or some sort of system to pay per article. I’d toss a quarter here and there for content.
  - lstamour 2y ago
    It’s like cheap Canadian cellphone or internet plans - you have to wait until a news org offers a deal, then sign up for it. Managed to get cheap NYT and WSJ subs from it. You have to cancel when the price goes up and then accept the offer at cancellation to keep your low price for one more year, forever. Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!
    - ljf 2y ago
      I feel very lucky that my local library has 'libby' an ebook reader that also has magazines and some papers - all for free. It is pretty nice to read a couple of magazines in the evening, as an alternative to 'just one more social media app...'
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - p3rls 2y ago
    I chose to go with a $3 subscription model myself, at that cheap it's just a waste of time to go through the unsub process. Cha Ching.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$ The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested) K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.
  - joe_the_user 2y ago
    I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary. This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    Bundle subscriptions would make a lot of sense. I'd pay $10/month to access "the news". I'm not going to pay $10/month to access 1% of the news. At the same time, $10/month is more money than the $0/month the news sites are getting from me right now. This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...
- paulcole 2y ago
  > You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin Dang and this whole time I’ve been deciding which content I value and then paying for it.
- a2128 2y ago
  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
  - airstrike 2y ago
    > so it would bypass the limit, but if you kept doing it then it'd probably accumulate free articles still and stop working at which point one could perhaps try visiting example.com../page
    - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
      The reason the trailing dot works is that it represents the implicit root DNS node. Browsers do the dumb thing and consider it a different domain, but AFAIK there's no good reason not to canonicalize the domain name. All that to say, no, you sadly can't add another trailing dot.
      - jonhohle 2y ago
        I had never thought about having a local search domain so something like google.com.mynetwork. would resolve (the tailing dot prevents search domain lookups). Would a browser allow that internal site to access google.com cookies (since the lookup would be for google.com, no trailing dot). I suppose that would only work for unsecured traffic anyway so maybe not a huge attack vector. Edit to add: if you have web services that are resolved via DNS, it may be a performance advantage to configure clients with the trailing dot. A lifetime ago we ran into intermittent latency issues when some DNS resolvers would try to search before checking the canonical entry.
        cortesoft 2y ago
        That wouldn't work because Google would not return the proper content, since the host header would not match google.com. HTTPS would not work either, like you said, because the cert would not match the new domain. If they didn't check host headers, then no, the browser would not send the cookies for google.com, since the browser has no idea about your DNS changes and is only looking at the domain name itself.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  One can also disable Javascript for individual sites ("site settings"). Or use a client that does not implement cookies, localStorage or Javascript, like the original www browsers. I have been using these for decades. In the relatively rare case I have to use a popular, graphical browser distributed by an entity that collects users' data to support online ad services, on a network I do not control, I use Javascript site settings and/or UBlock Origin. But that is far more complicated, more resource intensive and slower compared to using a simpler client and a localhost-bound forward proxy. Plus I am at the mercy of third parties: 1. the advertising-supported company distributing the browser and 2. the "browser extension" developer.
  - joedevon 2y ago
    Which browser(s) do you mean/use. I turn off js on chrome as well.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
    If I am reading HTML with hyperlinks, I use the "links" browser with some custom modifications. Most times, I am making HTTP requests with TCP clients, not a browser. If I am using an HTTP client, I use tnftp with custom modifications, fetch, or some other small client I can easily modify. I use a localhost-bound TLS forward proxy. Thus I can use a wide assortment of old TCP and HTTP clients from years when software was less bloated. For example, I still use orginal netcat heavily on a daily basis. When I retrieve HTML/JSON/CSV, I use small, simple UNIX filters I write myself to extract what I want and present it in a readable text-only format and/or insert it into a SQLite3 database. I like the sqlite3 text-only output formats. Hitting a limit on the number of news articles I can read is not something I am personally familiar with, and I use the same news websites as the people who complain about this, hence I believe it is associated with the browsers they are using, not the websites.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
    Sometimes news stories or other page contents have no useful hyperlinks yet they are still presented as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). I operate in textmode, no graphics. There are few benefits I get from the use of HTML without useful hyperlinks. In such cases, using a browser is unecessary, overkill. I use a pager instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager
akira2501 2y ago
> You’ll have to say to them gently, softly, “To be honest, I have no fucking clue. I was out of free articles.” You can't copyright facts and journalism belongs to the people not to the institutions that are capable of publishing editorials at scale.
- remoquete 2y ago
  Quality journalism, and, even more importantly, free journalism (as in neutral or unbiased), costs money. I think a subscription is a very low effort compared to the kind of risks and hard work top reporters go through. Another angle: prose and code describe facts using slightly different languages, but would you say that code (or institutions capable of publishing code at scale) shouldn't exist or that they should "belong to people" (what does that mean anyway?)
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Journalism does not cost money. Running a company that is attempting to profit off of publishing costs money. Or have you never read anything produced at no benefit to the author that has ever informed you? I think you're putting the cart before the horse, and advertising supported journalism has always existed, and these companies would rather collect CPM from google than do legitimate placement of ads in their own content, which would be unblockable. No, what I'm saying is, the existence of institutions that can publish at scale has no impact on whether individuals can do it or not. I can write code whether Google exists or doesn't. In that sense it belongs to individuals.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Of course journalism costs money. Sometimes it’s just not directly paid (most commonly: ad-supported journalism), or even paid for by the journalist with their time and opportunity cost of not selling it to somebody that does charge for it (blogs etc.) If none of these are applicable, chances are it’s PR, not journalism.
      - 2y ago
syndicatedjelly 2y ago
When I ask older family members where they were or how they reacted when some important event happened, they usually say something like, busy with real life. Being glued to the news is a modern phenomenon, it’s not the required state of being
- akulbe 2y ago
  I stopped watching and reading the news, in general. I have some friends who balked at the idea when I mentioned it. They'd say, "Oh, but how do you keep up on important news?" I don't. My life is better for letting it go. If something is genuinely important, and I really need to know - I always end up finding out somehow.
  - amelius 2y ago
    And yet, here you are, on HN.
    - takumif 2y ago
      I read tech news because I enjoy it. I don't read articles about autocrats or mass shootings or whatever because I don't enjoy them, and me reading them doesn't make the world a better place.
  - TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
    I think a reasonable barometer for a lot of news is: will this be important or relevant in 1 month? If the answer is "no", then it's probably more entertainment than anything else. However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news. For certain vulnerable groups, keeping up to date with politics and the news might have a tangible impact in their everyday life. With that being said, I generally don't keep up with the news either.
    - majormajor 2y ago
zem 2y ago
wow, they nailed the "vague feeling of doom" tone. I continue to be impressed by the sheer quality of writing mcsweeneys puts out.
- hodgesrm 2y ago
  This one was poetry itself, down to the verse-like meter and the repeated refrain: "This is your last free article." We are not worthy.
thinkingkong 2y ago
Its so wild to me that the business models of newspapers and journalism in general just dont translate well to the web. Like I get that people expect content online to be free and the alternative sources of information are freely available but its just so tragic. There are so few journalists who do investigative journalism in countries that are smaller because the ad revenue just isnt there. For example, there are a few youtubers who do a great job but their appeal is global - or at least the entire english speaking population. The scope of focus is “interesting conspiracies that are true” or “some product everyone wants”. Not a serious investigation into the misallocated funds in the local county.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  (1) The web offers a plethora of choices, and one subscription doesn't cover that. Like, pre-internet if you wanted National Geographic-type info, you could only get that with a hard copy of National Geographic. (2) People psychologically struggle with paying for something non tangible.
- ajb 2y ago
  The business model is journalism was advertising and it translated fine to the web. The problem is, it turned out that advertising didn't need journalism. Google ate the newspapers' lunch.
  - majormajor 2y ago
    The business model was dual revenue streams: subscription (or a la carte day-by-day or month-by-month) + ad revenue, with a few exceptions like broadcast TV (where the coverage tended to be more shallow and lowest-common-denominator compared to the early days of cable TV news). The online advertising merchants realized they could "curate" and "summarize" the articles, resulting in far fewer ad impressions than if someone had to find things purely through the publication newspaper, and bring the ads forward to their portal instead of solely on the content itself. AND they capitalized on an early reluctance to charge for things online to push the "ew, who wants to pay" mindset globally.
  - 7184 2y ago
meristohm 2y ago
The public libraries in the USA that I'm familiar with have thousands of periodicals accessible on Libby. That's one way to slightly fund the authors of the essays and other features in those magazines.
- ljf 2y ago
  I posted it elsewhere - but libby is also available in some parts of the UK - I feel so lucky to have it, really good selection of content on there.. In fact I need to dig out my ancient ipad and see if it will run on there still. One more reason to put my phone down.
yegle 2y ago
I was a happy user of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor 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.
- notRobot 2y ago
  I never knew that was a thing! Of course they killed it. I wish they still had it. I would definitely subscribe.
- karlgkk 2y ago
  Apple made this, Apple News. It works great. Google could totally pull something like this off
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  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.
  - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
    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.
neilv 2y ago
Don't worry, HN will almost instantly post archive.is pirate links.
c64d81744074dfa 2y ago
For some reason, when I read this I heard it in the voice of GlaDOS. "All your other friends couldn't come either because you don't have any other friends. Because of how unlikable you are."
crooked-v 2y ago
You know, from the title I thought this was going to go for the funnier/darker angle of an automated system deciding the reader doesn't need any more free articles because the system has predicted they're going to die before the company gets any benefits from the ad impressions.
lmaoguy 2y ago
[dead]
Animats 2y ago
Almost all US news sources now have either a paywall, an article limit, or a demand that ad blockers be turned off. A notable exception is Fox News.
- waltbosz 2y ago
  Fox News does have a article limit. It didn't ask for money, but it definitely wanted me to create an account to view an article. I was able to bypass with incognito browser. The strange thing was, the article I read was almost verbatim to the one I had just read on CNN. Maybe they both just copied from the AP? I dunno how these things work. It is fun to compare how different news source report the same story.
furrypony 2y ago
[flagged]
rldjbpin 2y ago
monetizing the web is something i don't bother thinking about getting solved. but how the parties go about the situation is always entertaining. we are a technically skilled bunch and find ways around it. but is there a scope to inject advertizing into the "content" (i.e. the article) in a similar way youtube is experimenting with video (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660464)?
jameslk 2y ago
“You’ve Read Your Last Free Article”, aka “Open This Page In Incognito Mode Reminder”
Lewis324 2y ago
[dead]

216 points by ohjeez 2y ago

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://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-scripting https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

itsoktocry 2y ago
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 the $2.50 or $5.00 subs? I feel like we anchor to $10 because it's a nice easy number, but the average person just can't afford very many of these, and no single subscription is good enough. So we sustain our desire to not pay for anything.
- rectang 2y ago
  I'm willing to sign up for some cheap subscriptions through Apple that I'd be unlikely to make directly because I don't have the energy to scrutinize individual vendors regarding hidden charges, dark patterns, data collection, security breaches, etc. I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.
  - dandandan 2y ago
    Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  It went the same way as a $5 lunch.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  Blogger siderea has talked about this a lot in relation to patreon, and the challenges for any platform wanting to replace it. EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform. Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs. EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.
  - exe34 2y ago
    i suppose you could make a $10 donation to the site and they could give you free coupons for articles.
    - adolph 2y ago
      The coupons could be on a cryptographic ledger so you have access to it from mobile/desktop/family members and any article could ask for payment from it or maybe different pricing for different sales funnel entry points. I think this is what Brave browser has set up, but I havnt been motivated enough to inquire.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        Or they could just be… in a regular old database of the issuer, who is the one that will validate them anyway when you redeem them for articles?
    - lxgr 2y ago
      If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.
      - 2y ago
- bsder 2y ago
  > 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.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > 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.
    - bsder 2y ago
      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.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor. And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer. If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.
- erkt 2y ago
  Or some sort of system to pay per article. I’d toss a quarter here and there for content.
- lstamour 2y ago
  It’s like cheap Canadian cellphone or internet plans - you have to wait until a news org offers a deal, then sign up for it. Managed to get cheap NYT and WSJ subs from it. You have to cancel when the price goes up and then accept the offer at cancellation to keep your low price for one more year, forever. Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!
  - ljf 2y ago
    I feel very lucky that my local library has 'libby' an ebook reader that also has magazines and some papers - all for free. It is pretty nice to read a couple of magazines in the evening, as an alternative to 'just one more social media app...'
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- p3rls 2y ago
  I chose to go with a $3 subscription model myself, at that cheap it's just a waste of time to go through the unsub process. Cha Ching.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$ The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested) K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary. This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  Bundle subscriptions would make a lot of sense. I'd pay $10/month to access "the news". I'm not going to pay $10/month to access 1% of the news. At the same time, $10/month is more money than the $0/month the news sites are getting from me right now. This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...
paulcole 2y ago
> You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin Dang and this whole time I’ve been deciding which content I value and then paying for it.
a2128 2y ago
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
- airstrike 2y ago
  > so it would bypass the limit, but if you kept doing it then it'd probably accumulate free articles still and stop working at which point one could perhaps try visiting example.com../page
  - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
    The reason the trailing dot works is that it represents the implicit root DNS node. Browsers do the dumb thing and consider it a different domain, but AFAIK there's no good reason not to canonicalize the domain name. All that to say, no, you sadly can't add another trailing dot.
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      I had never thought about having a local search domain so something like google.com.mynetwork. would resolve (the tailing dot prevents search domain lookups). Would a browser allow that internal site to access google.com cookies (since the lookup would be for google.com, no trailing dot). I suppose that would only work for unsecured traffic anyway so maybe not a huge attack vector. Edit to add: if you have web services that are resolved via DNS, it may be a performance advantage to configure clients with the trailing dot. A lifetime ago we ran into intermittent latency issues when some DNS resolvers would try to search before checking the canonical entry.
      - cortesoft 2y ago
        That wouldn't work because Google would not return the proper content, since the host header would not match google.com. HTTPS would not work either, like you said, because the cert would not match the new domain. If they didn't check host headers, then no, the browser would not send the cookies for google.com, since the browser has no idea about your DNS changes and is only looking at the domain name itself.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
One can also disable Javascript for individual sites ("site settings"). Or use a client that does not implement cookies, localStorage or Javascript, like the original www browsers. I have been using these for decades. In the relatively rare case I have to use a popular, graphical browser distributed by an entity that collects users' data to support online ad services, on a network I do not control, I use Javascript site settings and/or UBlock Origin. But that is far more complicated, more resource intensive and slower compared to using a simpler client and a localhost-bound forward proxy. Plus I am at the mercy of third parties: 1. the advertising-supported company distributing the browser and 2. the "browser extension" developer.
- joedevon 2y ago
  Which browser(s) do you mean/use. I turn off js on chrome as well.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  If I am reading HTML with hyperlinks, I use the "links" browser with some custom modifications. Most times, I am making HTTP requests with TCP clients, not a browser. If I am using an HTTP client, I use tnftp with custom modifications, fetch, or some other small client I can easily modify. I use a localhost-bound TLS forward proxy. Thus I can use a wide assortment of old TCP and HTTP clients from years when software was less bloated. For example, I still use orginal netcat heavily on a daily basis. When I retrieve HTML/JSON/CSV, I use small, simple UNIX filters I write myself to extract what I want and present it in a readable text-only format and/or insert it into a SQLite3 database. I like the sqlite3 text-only output formats. Hitting a limit on the number of news articles I can read is not something I am personally familiar with, and I use the same news websites as the people who complain about this, hence I believe it is associated with the browsers they are using, not the websites.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  Sometimes news stories or other page contents have no useful hyperlinks yet they are still presented as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). I operate in textmode, no graphics. There are few benefits I get from the use of HTML without useful hyperlinks. In such cases, using a browser is unecessary, overkill. I use a pager instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager

akira2501 2y ago

> You’ll have to say to them gently, softly, “To be honest, I have no fucking clue. I was out of free articles.” You can't copyright facts and journalism belongs to the people not to the institutions that are capable of publishing editorials at scale.

remoquete 2y ago
Quality journalism, and, even more importantly, free journalism (as in neutral or unbiased), costs money. I think a subscription is a very low effort compared to the kind of risks and hard work top reporters go through. Another angle: prose and code describe facts using slightly different languages, but would you say that code (or institutions capable of publishing code at scale) shouldn't exist or that they should "belong to people" (what does that mean anyway?)
- akira2501 2y ago
  Journalism does not cost money. Running a company that is attempting to profit off of publishing costs money. Or have you never read anything produced at no benefit to the author that has ever informed you? I think you're putting the cart before the horse, and advertising supported journalism has always existed, and these companies would rather collect CPM from google than do legitimate placement of ads in their own content, which would be unblockable. No, what I'm saying is, the existence of institutions that can publish at scale has no impact on whether individuals can do it or not. I can write code whether Google exists or doesn't. In that sense it belongs to individuals.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Of course journalism costs money. Sometimes it’s just not directly paid (most commonly: ad-supported journalism), or even paid for by the journalist with their time and opportunity cost of not selling it to somebody that does charge for it (blogs etc.) If none of these are applicable, chances are it’s PR, not journalism.
    - 2y ago

syndicatedjelly 2y ago

When I ask older family members where they were or how they reacted when some important event happened, they usually say something like, busy with real life. Being glued to the news is a modern phenomenon, it’s not the required state of being

akulbe 2y ago
I stopped watching and reading the news, in general. I have some friends who balked at the idea when I mentioned it. They'd say, "Oh, but how do you keep up on important news?" I don't. My life is better for letting it go. If something is genuinely important, and I really need to know - I always end up finding out somehow.
- amelius 2y ago
  And yet, here you are, on HN.
  - takumif 2y ago
    I read tech news because I enjoy it. I don't read articles about autocrats or mass shootings or whatever because I don't enjoy them, and me reading them doesn't make the world a better place.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
  I think a reasonable barometer for a lot of news is: will this be important or relevant in 1 month? If the answer is "no", then it's probably more entertainment than anything else. However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news. For certain vulnerable groups, keeping up to date with politics and the news might have a tangible impact in their everyday life. With that being said, I generally don't keep up with the news either.
  - majormajor 2y ago

zem 2y ago

wow, they nailed the "vague feeling of doom" tone. I continue to be impressed by the sheer quality of writing mcsweeneys puts out.

hodgesrm 2y ago
This one was poetry itself, down to the verse-like meter and the repeated refrain: "This is your last free article." We are not worthy.

thinkingkong 2y ago

Its so wild to me that the business models of newspapers and journalism in general just dont translate well to the web. Like I get that people expect content online to be free and the alternative sources of information are freely available but its just so tragic. There are so few journalists who do investigative journalism in countries that are smaller because the ad revenue just isnt there. For example, there are a few youtubers who do a great job but their appeal is global - or at least the entire english speaking population. The scope of focus is “interesting conspiracies that are true” or “some product everyone wants”. Not a serious investigation into the misallocated funds in the local county.

paulddraper 2y ago
(1) The web offers a plethora of choices, and one subscription doesn't cover that. Like, pre-internet if you wanted National Geographic-type info, you could only get that with a hard copy of National Geographic. (2) People psychologically struggle with paying for something non tangible.
ajb 2y ago
The business model is journalism was advertising and it translated fine to the web. The problem is, it turned out that advertising didn't need journalism. Google ate the newspapers' lunch.
- majormajor 2y ago
  The business model was dual revenue streams: subscription (or a la carte day-by-day or month-by-month) + ad revenue, with a few exceptions like broadcast TV (where the coverage tended to be more shallow and lowest-common-denominator compared to the early days of cable TV news). The online advertising merchants realized they could "curate" and "summarize" the articles, resulting in far fewer ad impressions than if someone had to find things purely through the publication newspaper, and bring the ads forward to their portal instead of solely on the content itself. AND they capitalized on an early reluctance to charge for things online to push the "ew, who wants to pay" mindset globally.
- 7184 2y ago

meristohm 2y ago

The public libraries in the USA that I'm familiar with have thousands of periodicals accessible on Libby. That's one way to slightly fund the authors of the essays and other features in those magazines.

ljf 2y ago
I posted it elsewhere - but libby is also available in some parts of the UK - I feel so lucky to have it, really good selection of content on there.. In fact I need to dig out my ancient ipad and see if it will run on there still. One more reason to put my phone down.

yegle 2y ago

I was a happy user of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor 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.

notRobot 2y ago
I never knew that was a thing! Of course they killed it. I wish they still had it. I would definitely subscribe.
karlgkk 2y ago
Apple made this, Apple News. It works great. Google could totally pull something like this off
joe_the_user 2y ago
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.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  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.

neilv 2y ago

Don't worry, HN will almost instantly post archive.is pirate links.

c64d81744074dfa 2y ago

For some reason, when I read this I heard it in the voice of GlaDOS. "All your other friends couldn't come either because you don't have any other friends. Because of how unlikable you are."

crooked-v 2y ago

You know, from the title I thought this was going to go for the funnier/darker angle of an automated system deciding the reader doesn't need any more free articles because the system has predicted they're going to die before the company gets any benefits from the ad impressions.

lmaoguy 2y ago

[dead]

Animats 2y ago

Almost all US news sources now have either a paywall, an article limit, or a demand that ad blockers be turned off. A notable exception is Fox News.

waltbosz 2y ago
Fox News does have a article limit. It didn't ask for money, but it definitely wanted me to create an account to view an article. I was able to bypass with incognito browser. The strange thing was, the article I read was almost verbatim to the one I had just read on CNN. Maybe they both just copied from the AP? I dunno how these things work. It is fun to compare how different news source report the same story.

furrypony 2y ago

[flagged]

rldjbpin 2y ago

monetizing the web is something i don't bother thinking about getting solved. but how the parties go about the situation is always entertaining. we are a technically skilled bunch and find ways around it. but is there a scope to inject advertizing into the "content" (i.e. the article) in a similar way youtube is experimenting with video (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660464)?

jameslk 2y ago

“You’ve Read Your Last Free Article”, aka “Open This Page In Incognito Mode Reminder”

Lewis324 2y ago

[dead]