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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

• 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