How to get past a paywall to read an article ...

That model works great if you tend to get your news primarily from one news source. If you don't, then that's a lot of subscriptions, and especially if you want to go look at a local news article that got linked somewhere for a town you don't even live in. Most of the time I don't even want to register an account, let alone set up a subscription.

I've never come across a single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I've ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn't like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we're clear, I'm not saying that I don't to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it's worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it's worth it etc.

But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on some random science journal) isn't something that I'm really interested in pursuing a subscription for, just because I stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I'll subscribe just because of one random article... that's just shitty business.

Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say "hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!". I mean, that makes sense. I'd then go, "yep, this site has quality content and the type of content I'd like to read, so it's worth subscribing to".

But no, instead they're like "heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking you to pay for a whole month's worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn't going to put you off, right?"

My hot take is that we need more journalists on the NPR / local affiliate model. People should pledge to their local journalists, no news hidden behind subscriptions. Pay what you can, subscribers get early access to the entertainment / pop culture content, and don’t get blasted with pledge requests.

That’s my go-to technique. But I would prefer that Lifehacker was not publicizing it.

Thank you so much for telling us this!

THIS!!

Unfortunately, 12ft.io isn't nearly as effective as it used to be, likely because sites have become wise to it and tweaked their methods

If those news sources don't want to give away content for free then they shouldn't transmit those contents to the user's computer and then run a client-side script to pretend that they didn't.

Welcome to Lemmy. A place where the user based thinks that anarchism works, everything only being free isn't mainstream, and that piracy is the answer to teaching big companies a lesson but they will pirate Zelda and talk about how great it is but how terrible Nintendo is rather than just buying Zelda to support devs.

I have been on here 3 weeks and in those 3 weeks I have learned the community here has this thought that they are not as big of ass holes as people on Reddit. However, they are just as inclusive and additionally just different kinds of assholes.

A handful of Lemmy users on the "technology" community does not equal "most people". That's just bad journalism lol

no, we don't. we just don't want to pay several times to read a news article: first, a paywall (often with ridiculous prices), second, with our data. news sites mostly have the most hostile cookie policies in place i have ever seen - they want to "analyze" EVERYTHING, on of the bigger news papers in my country wants to install like 20 cookies just to allow me to visit their site. and third, ads left and right, autoplay videos and a hunger for hardware like a contemporary video game. finally, let's not talk about the quality of most contemporary news outlets, somewhere inbetween buzzfeed clickbait and being a gov't spox.

i worked over a decade in one of the biggest multinational publishing houses in europe, right on time when everyting went digital and that experience haunts me to this day.

Ideally I'd just be able to pay you.

The ads that already show on the article page should be paying you. i have no issue paying for services, but at the coffee shop i can read the newspaper for free, paywalling news blocks poor folks from participating

I heard you, but so what?

Imagine giving away newspapers, but some articles are covered by a flimsy piece of paper saying you need to pay before you can rip it off.

Who would honestly pay to read?

I see a paywall and I just leave and move onto the next thing

every browser allows this

+ublock origin would let you do this

I recently discovered that the Firefox add-on, ublock origin, has in its chooseable block lists, under annoyances, a cookie notice blocker with lots of other annoyance blockers as well.

You can usually get past a lot of that stuff by just using the reader mode (button in the address bar)

Consent-O-Matic for cookie pop-ups

The Ghostery extension supports auto-declining the cookie prompts.