24 ms·

12ft.io Taken Down

162 points by afeuerstein 1y ago

gnabgib 1y ago
Small discussion (29 points, 4 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601344
0x5FC3 1y ago
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
- morkalork 1y ago
  Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s
  - 0x5FC3 1y ago
    Just make the button work on the 3rd click, and count the other 2 as ad clicks.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Those of us old enough to remember newspapers hated when they did that. Or, wait…
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  It's a good question, and I can at least say something positive about every solution. Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair. Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism. Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever. Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else. Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    > Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting. I think the major issue is two-fold: 1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further. 2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly. To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop. The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
  - tempnew 1y ago
    “subscriptions like Apple News” They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
  - 1y ago
- abxyz 1y ago
  The solution is comfort in going without.
  - snihalani 1y ago
    I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you get a share for views
    - micromacrofoot 1y ago
      spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for ~99% of artists on it
      - jennyholzer 1y ago
        Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use it for income. Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates. E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024. Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this. Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music. This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
  - Supermancho 1y ago
    The fun and innovation of circumvention will never get old. There is no comfort to be had in stagnation.
- commandar 1y ago
  A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations. Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc. I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
  - jhaile 1y ago
    I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.
    - jennyholzer 1y ago
      this creates massive incentives for clickbait
      - mrkramer 1y ago
        No....because you would get to see preview of the article and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you would do it.
  - sonofaragorn 1y ago
    That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
    - commandar 1y ago
      Kinda? The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way. In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation. The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
- Arubis 1y ago
  The business model is broken, and, arguably, so too is the business environment--there's many angles from which it appears capitalism is no longer serving the public good. If we replaced it with another -ism, what might it be, and how might that support information and knowledge for the public good?
- yesfitz 1y ago
  If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card. Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library). Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan. It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
  - mathgeek 1y ago
    > It's astounding how radical the public library system is… As a child of the 80s/90s I absolutely love how both of my generation’s uses of “radical” fit perfectly in this sentence. Well chosen.
- dkarl 1y ago
  In one of his books about intellectual property law, Lawrence Lessig quoted an unnamed French lawmaker as saying, "There are two things Americans need to understand about art: art has nothing to do with money, and the artist must be paid!"
- phoronixrly 1y ago
  How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it. And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site. Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers. ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed. People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin. I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot. But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
  - stonogo 1y ago
    You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.
    - ASalazarMX 1y ago
      Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them. If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.
  - ACow_Adonis 1y ago
    Except its a bit like that PERL quote. You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities. You think, I know, i'll use ads! Now you have two problems.
  - cwillu 1y ago
    My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long ABP.
- yegle 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral. I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
  - lblume 1y ago
    So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...
    - AceJohnny2 1y ago
      You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers gets converted to cash for the website. Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
    - recursive 1y ago
      "Large portion"? I don't think it says that.
      - lblume 1y ago
        Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.
  - tukantje 1y ago
    Most likely reason why it'd be discontinued is that it makes rest of the ads less valuable; so to speak. People who can afford to & are willing to pay for something like this; tend to also be the type of people advertisers want to actually target: disposable income, willing to spend etc.
- yorwba 1y ago
  Most news outlets publish basically the same information and only the arrangement and commentary are different. Sometimes they'll even brazenly report on other reporting, paraphrasing enough of the original article that you don't really need to read it anymore. So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
    I just check reuters and apnews first these days to see what's going on before checking localized stuff.
- piva00 1y ago
  It's one space where I think some form of microtransaction (in the sub-cents USD) could work: I want to pay per article, not have yet another subscription in the 5-15 USD just because an article interested me. Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall. I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
  - jlarocco 1y ago
    I think that argument is begging the question. Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were. After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping. I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
    - dolmen 1y ago
      I don't subscribe (with payment) even to websites I trust for their content because I don't trust them for how they track users, and how users are (or could be) tracked everywhere by payment processors via those subscriptions. Subscribing to a public library where diversity of content is guaranteed but tracking is not per user is fine.
    - piva00 1y ago
      I've gone full circle and not even internet content, I now subscribe to a few physical magazine and enjoy the act of reading them on paper, it's a very different experience than on a screen. Similarly to my journey through ebooks back when Kindle launched, got very into it for a while but got tired of not being able to share interesting reads with friends, ended up buying physical copies of ebooks I really liked, and in the end just ditched ebooks to have only physical books on my bookshelves. Which leaves me in this weird position on the internet, I would like to pay for some of the articles I read from publications I respect but have no need nor will to subscribe to online.
- lanewinfield 1y ago
  Scroll ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) ) was attempting to solve this exact issue.
- m82labs 1y ago
  I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read. I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.
  - NicuCalcea 1y ago
    Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.
    - Crespyl 1y ago
      If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments. We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.
      - acdha 1y ago
        What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content. I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.
      - 1y ago
- jlarocco 1y ago
  I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find valuable and ignore the rest. Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
  - immibis 1y ago
    > Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything. Not even the publishers! But they sure feel entitled.
- sn9 1y ago
  I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be. Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
- BizarroLand 1y ago
  The real answer is that we need a universal web currency, and a tracker that pays web pages on view. There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost. No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices. No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads. Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
  - tukantje 1y ago
    > No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads. The assumption that publishers wouldn't double, or triple dip is absurd. If you've read any recent magazine you'll notice half of it is advertisement. You'd essentially end up with a paid web _and_ ads.
- pseudocomposer 1y ago
  I think something like Apple News (one subscription, many publications) is the best thing we’re likely to get in our current market conditions. In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.
- HumblyTossed 1y ago
  I feel like the major credit card companies really missed the boat with micropayments.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    Well yeah, sortof. Note that the credit card companies mostly function as tech providers for the actual banks, who get a bunch more of the money. And there are a bunch of fixed costs that emerge in running payment networks at scale (mostly related to fraud and disputes), so micropayments are a hard sell. Possible that someone could try again with stablecoins but I'm still sceptical it would work. Like, I'd pay for it but I already pay for a bunch of newspapers monthly.
crinkly 1y ago
https://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/ We need to keep making more of these.
- nehal3m 1y ago
  This article was archived 4 days ago. :-) https://archive.ph/dSeku https://archive.ph/dSeku
- CjHuber 1y ago
  Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.
  - vasco 1y ago
    The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled content.
    - x______________ 1y ago
      Or create a deeper underground where the masses do not get involved?
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out. You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring. If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
musha68k 1y ago
Streisand amplification in effect.
Raed667 1y ago
Was it ever publicly communicated how 12ft or archive.ph|is work? Or is it something they keep to themselves ?
- strongpigeon 1y ago
  I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating Googlebot.
  - beejiu 1y ago
    That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).
    - OldfieldFund 1y ago
      this shouldn't work due to reverse DNS checks
    - Raed667 1y ago
      doesn't google also run some "undercover" bots to verify that you don't serve very different versions of your website to users vs bots ?
    - ewoodrich 1y ago
      In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work with almost everything but at some point major news orgs caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering to try it.
  - cesarb 1y ago
    > they were just impersonating Googlebot. Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.
alfon 1y ago
https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
- reactordev 1y ago
  Not me jumping to the link only to realize I already have it stared ;) Great work.
- Arubis 1y ago
  Fabulous naming choice.
- manquer 1y ago
  I am curious why these workarounds continue to work . If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1] [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- morkalork 1y ago
  It can't be that easy, can it? Doesn't google bot have known ip ranges that publishers whitelist?
  - phoronixrly 1y ago
    It's not. In my experience they even completely block non-end-user IP ranges, and I'm not fond of being raided due to running this at home.
- joenot443 1y ago
  wasi_master said this the last time this project was posted - "Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support. Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067 Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
geegee3 1y ago
It hadn't worked for a long time.
varispeed 1y ago
I would understand if media were actually working - reporting on local issues, exposing corruption or where things are not working for residents. Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap. These media companies are parasites.
- toader 1y ago
  You're painting 'media' with a broad brush. I have multiple local sources that report on local issues and are critical of the local establishment. A lack of funding is causing local news sources to go out of business.
krunck 1y ago
I'm not paying for subscriptions. I'll pay per article or not at all.
tyzoid 1y ago
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site. There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
- Arubis 1y ago
  There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of course.
  - dwb 1y ago
    They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies them for me.
    - Arubis 1y ago
      Interesting--that hasn't been my experience. I have a _lot_ of filtering layers; one or more of them might be catching those.
    - vunderba 1y ago
      This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic, New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.
      - qwerpy 1y ago
        Thanks for making this known. On the face of it, it’s a good deal. First party slick app with ad-free good quality news content, with a nominal fee. If you pay the Apple premium, they’ll give you the best possible experience and not clutter your screen with ads, right? Guess not.
- Aurornis 1y ago
micromacrofoot 1y ago
Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns. My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on. If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all). If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
- toader 1y ago
  Do you think they have to raise their subscription prices because many people are stealing the content?
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    If they thought that they wouldn't be begging me to pay $4 instead of $30 whenever I try to cancel. I wonder if they've ever attempted to calculate the cost of being incredibly unpleasant as a service.
    - toader 1y ago
      I don't have the context to comment on the interpersonal skills of the media outlet. If the price is $30 after the introductory price, then the price is $30. You disagreeing with the price or their sales tactic doesn't entitle you to steal their content.
      - micromacrofoot 1y ago
        I don't need to be entitled, I can just do it. Call the police, no one cares.
        1y ago
humblebeekeeper 1y ago
Ok, I guess I won't read content from News Media Alliance outlets. I think they are probably fine with that. I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
mrkramer 1y ago
In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft. Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
- Gys 1y ago
  > replaced by microtransactions I assume you mean micro payments? Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
  - mrkramer 1y ago
    Yea, micropayments but people can't keep up with dozens subscriptions. Someone will figure out micropayments sooner or later.
    - gschizas 1y ago
      I mean, Jakob Nielsen has been advocating for them since last century: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
      - mrkramer 1y ago
        He was ahead of his time.
robswc 1y ago
I think the biggest issue is the _vast_ majority of news is noise. It won't effect you. Maybe you could argue we should be "aware" of certain events happening but I'd argue most only complicate your life. I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
- NicuCalcea 1y ago
  As a journalist, I think you're absolutely right, I've met lots of people who clearly won't benefit from reading the news.
pentagrama 1y ago
Bypass Paywalls Clean extension [1] still working and getting updates [2]. [1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234 https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234 [2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/blob/?file=changelog.txt https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
- NelsonMinar 1y ago
  I use this all the time and it does work very well. You do have to update it (manually) on occasion though, sometimes it can break things if you don't.
  - throwawayq3423 1y ago
    These dont work for me, the browser refuses to install them. "Error Manifest file is missing or unreadable Could not load manifest."
corny 1y ago
Check if your local library has a PressReader subscription. It doesn't help open links to paywalled articles, but depending on your library, you may already have access to a lot of newspapers and magazines.
rckt 1y ago
Not sure how is this illegal. It’s like saying that listening to a song that is played anywhere, but your paid service is illegal. Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
- toader 1y ago
  If you created software and sold a license for it, and I pirated it, would that be acceptable? They create a product, set the price, you choose to pay or not.
  - rckt 1y ago
    It's a bit different in practice with media. You can hear/read/see it anywhere. You can read someone's newspaper in the public transport or listen to a song in a cafeteria or watch something at your friend's house. Yes, somebody paid for it anyway, but there's no way to control the following spread of it.
    - toader 1y ago
      Sure, if you hear or see something in a public space, but don't you agree that deliberately bypassing their means of protecting their IP is theft?
      - rckt 1y ago
        It's debatable in every aspect. Internet - is partly public, so it's not something they couldn't expect - that somebody will try to read their articles avoiding the paywall. I personally support on a monthly basis the media that I definitely want to exist. The others... well, they also probably have their audience. I don;t know the economy of the whole thing, but probably in the end everyone gets their audience/support group.
        toader 1y ago
        > "It's debatable in every aspect" -- A business creates a product. They offer the product to consumers for a price. If you take the product without paying, you are stealing. Seems straightforward to me.
lovelearning 1y ago
If this News Media Alliance put some effort into enabling per-article micropayments or a prepaid credits system valid across all its members, there'd be fewer people looking to bypass paywalls.
varelse 1y ago
[dead]
floppiplopp 1y ago
Now I'm going to steal even harder from the corpos.
- toader 1y ago
  So you value their content but plan to continue stealing it and jeopardize their ability to remain financially solvent?
  - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
    It's cringy how you are in every thread of this submission using the lamest arguments from decades ago. "Stealing" lmao.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
drcongo 1y ago
I love the phrase "purveyors of unauthorized paywall bypassing technologies". Makes them sound like a high-end, boutique winery.
spicyusername 1y ago
Serious question: How do we expect reporters and journalists to be funded if nobody pays? I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue. Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...
- toader 1y ago
  Exactly. Why this is such a difficult concept to grasp? They create a product, set a price, you choose to subscribe or not. If you created licensed software and someone pirated it, are you agreeable to that?
  - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
    Piracy is the reality of life. You can't really "turn if off", so as a company you have to plan with that in mind. Bringing up morality or whatever is a complete non sequitur.
deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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162 points by afeuerstein 1y ago

Small discussion (29 points, 4 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601344

0x5FC3 1y ago

We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?

morkalork 1y ago
Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s
- 0x5FC3 1y ago
  Just make the button work on the 3rd click, and count the other 2 as ad clicks.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Those of us old enough to remember newspapers hated when they did that. Or, wait…
hombre_fatal 1y ago
It's a good question, and I can at least say something positive about every solution. Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair. Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism. Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever. Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else. Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting. I think the major issue is two-fold: 1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further. 2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly. To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop. The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
- tempnew 1y ago
  “subscriptions like Apple News” They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
- 1y ago
abxyz 1y ago
The solution is comfort in going without.
- snihalani 1y ago
  I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you get a share for views
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for ~99% of artists on it
    - jennyholzer 1y ago
      Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use it for income. Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates. E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024. Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this. Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music. This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
- Supermancho 1y ago
  The fun and innovation of circumvention will never get old. There is no comfort to be had in stagnation.
commandar 1y ago
A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations. Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc. I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
- jhaile 1y ago
  I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.
  - jennyholzer 1y ago
    this creates massive incentives for clickbait
    - mrkramer 1y ago
      No....because you would get to see preview of the article and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you would do it.
- sonofaragorn 1y ago
  That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
  - commandar 1y ago
    Kinda? The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way. In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation. The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
Arubis 1y ago
The business model is broken, and, arguably, so too is the business environment--there's many angles from which it appears capitalism is no longer serving the public good. If we replaced it with another -ism, what might it be, and how might that support information and knowledge for the public good?
yesfitz 1y ago
If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card. Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library). Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan. It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  > It's astounding how radical the public library system is… As a child of the 80s/90s I absolutely love how both of my generation’s uses of “radical” fit perfectly in this sentence. Well chosen.
dkarl 1y ago
In one of his books about intellectual property law, Lawrence Lessig quoted an unnamed French lawmaker as saying, "There are two things Americans need to understand about art: art has nothing to do with money, and the artist must be paid!"
phoronixrly 1y ago
How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it. And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site. Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
Workaccount2 1y ago
ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers. ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed. People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin. I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot. But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
- stonogo 1y ago
  You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.
  - ASalazarMX 1y ago
    Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them. If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.
- ACow_Adonis 1y ago
  Except its a bit like that PERL quote. You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities. You think, I know, i'll use ads! Now you have two problems.
- cwillu 1y ago
  My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long ABP.
yegle 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral. I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
- lblume 1y ago
  So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...
  - AceJohnny2 1y ago
    You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers gets converted to cash for the website. Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
  - recursive 1y ago
    "Large portion"? I don't think it says that.
    - lblume 1y ago
      Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.
- tukantje 1y ago
  Most likely reason why it'd be discontinued is that it makes rest of the ads less valuable; so to speak. People who can afford to & are willing to pay for something like this; tend to also be the type of people advertisers want to actually target: disposable income, willing to spend etc.
yorwba 1y ago
Most news outlets publish basically the same information and only the arrangement and commentary are different. Sometimes they'll even brazenly report on other reporting, paraphrasing enough of the original article that you don't really need to read it anymore. So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
  I just check reuters and apnews first these days to see what's going on before checking localized stuff.
piva00 1y ago
It's one space where I think some form of microtransaction (in the sub-cents USD) could work: I want to pay per article, not have yet another subscription in the 5-15 USD just because an article interested me. Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall. I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
- jlarocco 1y ago
  I think that argument is begging the question. Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were. After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping. I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
  - dolmen 1y ago
    I don't subscribe (with payment) even to websites I trust for their content because I don't trust them for how they track users, and how users are (or could be) tracked everywhere by payment processors via those subscriptions. Subscribing to a public library where diversity of content is guaranteed but tracking is not per user is fine.
  - piva00 1y ago
    I've gone full circle and not even internet content, I now subscribe to a few physical magazine and enjoy the act of reading them on paper, it's a very different experience than on a screen. Similarly to my journey through ebooks back when Kindle launched, got very into it for a while but got tired of not being able to share interesting reads with friends, ended up buying physical copies of ebooks I really liked, and in the end just ditched ebooks to have only physical books on my bookshelves. Which leaves me in this weird position on the internet, I would like to pay for some of the articles I read from publications I respect but have no need nor will to subscribe to online.
lanewinfield 1y ago
Scroll ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) ) was attempting to solve this exact issue.
m82labs 1y ago
I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read. I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.
- NicuCalcea 1y ago
  Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.
  - Crespyl 1y ago
    If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments. We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.
    - acdha 1y ago
      What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content. I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.
    - 1y ago
jlarocco 1y ago
I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find valuable and ignore the rest. Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
- immibis 1y ago
  > Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything. Not even the publishers! But they sure feel entitled.
sn9 1y ago
I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be. Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
BizarroLand 1y ago
The real answer is that we need a universal web currency, and a tracker that pays web pages on view. There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost. No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices. No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads. Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
- tukantje 1y ago
  > No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads. The assumption that publishers wouldn't double, or triple dip is absurd. If you've read any recent magazine you'll notice half of it is advertisement. You'd essentially end up with a paid web _and_ ads.
pseudocomposer 1y ago
I think something like Apple News (one subscription, many publications) is the best thing we’re likely to get in our current market conditions. In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.
HumblyTossed 1y ago
I feel like the major credit card companies really missed the boat with micropayments.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Well yeah, sortof. Note that the credit card companies mostly function as tech providers for the actual banks, who get a bunch more of the money. And there are a bunch of fixed costs that emerge in running payment networks at scale (mostly related to fraud and disputes), so micropayments are a hard sell. Possible that someone could try again with stablecoins but I'm still sceptical it would work. Like, I'd pay for it but I already pay for a bunch of newspapers monthly.

crinkly 1y ago

https://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/ We need to keep making more of these.

nehal3m 1y ago
This article was archived 4 days ago. :-) https://archive.ph/dSeku https://archive.ph/dSeku
CjHuber 1y ago
Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.
- vasco 1y ago
  The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled content.
  - x______________ 1y ago
    Or create a deeper underground where the masses do not get involved?
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out. You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring. If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.

musha68k 1y ago

Streisand amplification in effect.

Raed667 1y ago

Was it ever publicly communicated how 12ft or archive.ph|is work? Or is it something they keep to themselves ?

strongpigeon 1y ago
I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating Googlebot.
- beejiu 1y ago
  That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).
  - OldfieldFund 1y ago
    this shouldn't work due to reverse DNS checks
  - Raed667 1y ago
    doesn't google also run some "undercover" bots to verify that you don't serve very different versions of your website to users vs bots ?
  - ewoodrich 1y ago
    In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work with almost everything but at some point major news orgs caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering to try it.
- cesarb 1y ago
  > they were just impersonating Googlebot. Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.

alfon 1y ago

https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft

reactordev 1y ago
Not me jumping to the link only to realize I already have it stared ;) Great work.
Arubis 1y ago
Fabulous naming choice.
manquer 1y ago
I am curious why these workarounds continue to work . If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1] [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
morkalork 1y ago
It can't be that easy, can it? Doesn't google bot have known ip ranges that publishers whitelist?
- phoronixrly 1y ago
  It's not. In my experience they even completely block non-end-user IP ranges, and I'm not fond of being raided due to running this at home.
joenot443 1y ago
wasi_master said this the last time this project was posted - "Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support. Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067 Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.

geegee3 1y ago

It hadn't worked for a long time.

varispeed 1y ago

I would understand if media were actually working - reporting on local issues, exposing corruption or where things are not working for residents. Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap. These media companies are parasites.

toader 1y ago
You're painting 'media' with a broad brush. I have multiple local sources that report on local issues and are critical of the local establishment. A lack of funding is causing local news sources to go out of business.

krunck 1y ago

I'm not paying for subscriptions. I'll pay per article or not at all.

tyzoid 1y ago

The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site. There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.

Arubis 1y ago
There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of course.
- dwb 1y ago
  They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies them for me.
  - Arubis 1y ago
    Interesting--that hasn't been my experience. I have a _lot_ of filtering layers; one or more of them might be catching those.
  - vunderba 1y ago
    This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic, New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.
    - qwerpy 1y ago
      Thanks for making this known. On the face of it, it’s a good deal. First party slick app with ad-free good quality news content, with a nominal fee. If you pay the Apple premium, they’ll give you the best possible experience and not clutter your screen with ads, right? Guess not.
Aurornis 1y ago

micromacrofoot 1y ago

Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns. My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on. If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all). If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.

toader 1y ago
Do you think they have to raise their subscription prices because many people are stealing the content?
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  If they thought that they wouldn't be begging me to pay $4 instead of $30 whenever I try to cancel. I wonder if they've ever attempted to calculate the cost of being incredibly unpleasant as a service.
  - toader 1y ago
    I don't have the context to comment on the interpersonal skills of the media outlet. If the price is $30 after the introductory price, then the price is $30. You disagreeing with the price or their sales tactic doesn't entitle you to steal their content.
    - micromacrofoot 1y ago
      I don't need to be entitled, I can just do it. Call the police, no one cares.
      - 1y ago

humblebeekeeper 1y ago

Ok, I guess I won't read content from News Media Alliance outlets. I think they are probably fine with that. I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.

mrkramer 1y ago

In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft. Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.

Gys 1y ago
> replaced by microtransactions I assume you mean micro payments? Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
- mrkramer 1y ago
  Yea, micropayments but people can't keep up with dozens subscriptions. Someone will figure out micropayments sooner or later.
  - gschizas 1y ago
    I mean, Jakob Nielsen has been advocating for them since last century: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
    - mrkramer 1y ago
      He was ahead of his time.

robswc 1y ago

I think the biggest issue is the _vast_ majority of news is noise. It won't effect you. Maybe you could argue we should be "aware" of certain events happening but I'd argue most only complicate your life. I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.

NicuCalcea 1y ago
As a journalist, I think you're absolutely right, I've met lots of people who clearly won't benefit from reading the news.

pentagrama 1y ago

Bypass Paywalls Clean extension [1] still working and getting updates [2]. [1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234 https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234 [2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/blob/?file=changelog.txt https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...

NelsonMinar 1y ago
I use this all the time and it does work very well. You do have to update it (manually) on occasion though, sometimes it can break things if you don't.
- throwawayq3423 1y ago
  These dont work for me, the browser refuses to install them. "Error Manifest file is missing or unreadable Could not load manifest."

corny 1y ago

Check if your local library has a PressReader subscription. It doesn't help open links to paywalled articles, but depending on your library, you may already have access to a lot of newspapers and magazines.

rckt 1y ago

Not sure how is this illegal. It’s like saying that listening to a song that is played anywhere, but your paid service is illegal. Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.

toader 1y ago
If you created software and sold a license for it, and I pirated it, would that be acceptable? They create a product, set the price, you choose to pay or not.
- rckt 1y ago
  It's a bit different in practice with media. You can hear/read/see it anywhere. You can read someone's newspaper in the public transport or listen to a song in a cafeteria or watch something at your friend's house. Yes, somebody paid for it anyway, but there's no way to control the following spread of it.
  - toader 1y ago
    Sure, if you hear or see something in a public space, but don't you agree that deliberately bypassing their means of protecting their IP is theft?
    - rckt 1y ago
      It's debatable in every aspect. Internet - is partly public, so it's not something they couldn't expect - that somebody will try to read their articles avoiding the paywall. I personally support on a monthly basis the media that I definitely want to exist. The others... well, they also probably have their audience. I don;t know the economy of the whole thing, but probably in the end everyone gets their audience/support group.
      - toader 1y ago
        > "It's debatable in every aspect" -- A business creates a product. They offer the product to consumers for a price. If you take the product without paying, you are stealing. Seems straightforward to me.

lovelearning 1y ago

If this News Media Alliance put some effort into enabling per-article micropayments or a prepaid credits system valid across all its members, there'd be fewer people looking to bypass paywalls.

varelse 1y ago

[dead]

floppiplopp 1y ago

Now I'm going to steal even harder from the corpos.

toader 1y ago
So you value their content but plan to continue stealing it and jeopardize their ability to remain financially solvent?
- AlexeyBelov 1y ago
  It's cringy how you are in every thread of this submission using the lamest arguments from decades ago. "Stealing" lmao.
  - deleted 1y ago
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drcongo 1y ago

I love the phrase "purveyors of unauthorized paywall bypassing technologies". Makes them sound like a high-end, boutique winery.

spicyusername 1y ago

Serious question: How do we expect reporters and journalists to be funded if nobody pays? I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue. Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...

toader 1y ago
Exactly. Why this is such a difficult concept to grasp? They create a product, set a price, you choose to subscribe or not. If you created licensed software and someone pirated it, are you agreeable to that?
- AlexeyBelov 1y ago
  Piracy is the reality of life. You can't really "turn if off", so as a company you have to plan with that in mind. Bringing up morality or whatever is a complete non sequitur.

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