I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but https://archive.ph/ is a good way to see the content in those cases.
But really, if you are regularly reading content on a site you should subscribe to support the journalists employed there.
If they had a common subscription, where you pay one reasonable fee and they divide it up according to whose articles you read, I'd subscribe to that. Since they don't, I subscribe to one paper and do workarounds on the others. I feel this is ethical because if everyone did it, with a decently random distribution, then the newspapers would survive just fine. They'd make the same overall revenue as when everyone had one newspaper, showing up at their doorstep each morning.
What most of the press subscription services make the mistake of is trying to simplify the billing process to the individual. Ripe opportunity for someone to come along and make an all in one paid subscription service at the county level and make it easy to log into all sites with your library membership.
The current one is per site model is way too much from too not be worth it.
So some extent that's what Apple News+ (included in Apple One) is. But it doesn't do multi region stuff I don't think, and misses some major publications.
Twitter $8, FB $12 (web) / $15 ios)
You're asking for the cable tv model where they aggregate premium channels, imho that doesn't work either... you end up paying for a lot of stuff that you're not interested in.
I used to subscribe to the nytimes but a few years ago I needed a break from news. My plan was to come back in 6-12 months, but they made me wait on the phone for 25 mins for something that should have taken a couple of minutes on their site. I cancelled and never went back.
These may actually be EU rules BTW, haven't checked.
"May I ask why you want to cancel your account today?"
"No, you may not."
For some insane reason they ALL phrase the question this way, enabling this little grammatical gem of a response. Enjoy.
This website almost succeed every time I run out of my tricks, like:
1) ESC to interrupt the page load 2) quickly hit "view mode" before the wall appears 3) add a "." behind the .com, so like .com./ 4) visit in incognito window when the tokens run out (e.g. Medium) 5) Check Google cache of this page, (you can quickly add cache: URL to visit the cache page) 6) Check archive.org cache of some lost pages 7) maybe some extensions but I seldom use them nowadays 8) before, there are some cool sites like, sorry I forgot the names, all stopped working, those websites can remove paypall
9) console tricks though I dunno.
- Is it fair use because it's "archiving" the web?
- Is it because it's on the open web and it's public domain?
- Or is it illegal, and people do it because they can ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is Google cache legal?
What about Internet Archive wayback machine archive?
Is deleting your cookies legal? How about spoofing your user-agent?
How about a browser plugin that automates what OP describes?
In the case of caches like Google, Internet Archive, or `archive.today` (same thing as `archive.ph`)... probably, in the USA? If it winds up in court, we will find out, eventually.
Simply reading anything on the web technically involves "making a copy" already, which is one reason it gets and has remained somewhat confusing and complex to determine what is or is not legal with regard to copying web content. You can't simply say "making a copy is not allowed".
I think for search engine crawlers there are versions without a paywall so these articles can get fully indexed. Archive.ph, and similar services, might get the full content this way somehow. But I am just guessing.
https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-recommends-usi...
https://blog.archive.today/post/678202832257794048/why-cant-...
While pretending to be GoogleBot used to get you full articles (or grabbing them from cache) this doesn't seem to be the case for some sites anymore.
They just give the first part of the article without the paywall, as that's usually enough for SEO purposes.
Yes, archive.ph works most of the time, can't recommend it enough.
I'd go further than your statement: I try not to read paywalled contents. Actually I don't get all these workarounds about paywalls. I'm like "they don't want me to read it? I'm not going to read it then".
While there are some paywalled websites that allow you to read _n_ articles per period for "free", there are many that don't. How do I know in this case whether it's worth the cost?
There are also times where I'll see a link to something behind a paywall with an interesting headline (frequently on HN), but from a publication I don't regularly read, so have no intention of a subscription. It would be nice in this case to be able to pay a one-time, small contribution.
Worth stating I don't disagree necessarily with the sentiment, there are just a few "edge cases" that make it impractical.
bloomberg.com for instance, hides pay walled lines in empty <div>s.
the other method is to disable javascript and cookies (works on nytimes.com), or press ESC key to stop page loading before paywall kicks in (works on telegraph.co.uk) :)
https://site.com./1235/article
Those behind Cloudflare don't seem to be vulnerable to this though.
I've emailed the sites I've found where this works and none of them have fixed it after a year.
Why?
Guess it's a feature then and not a bug.
Paywalled sites are just fine, but they are not part of the open Internet, and should not pretend to be.
It's like if you needed an app to view a page, yet Google had all its content indexed. Why is that (rightly) seen as unreasonable while charging users for content you provide to bots for free isn't?
This isn’t true. This paywall treatment is something they do allow and have worked to accommodate.
Google could easily add an option to filter out paywalled content but that would reduce clicks.
Paywalls are insidious because they target non-subscribers. Why let non-subscribers view articles. Why not password protect all subscriber content. Paywalls are a way to make money from (the attention of) non-subscribers, targeting them with ads and tracking. The strategy is apparently to annoy people to the point of subscribing. Yet even if they subscribe they will still be subjected to advertising. One potential advantage is that a paying subscriber has an enforceable contract. In theory the contract could contain enforceable privacy protections. "Tech" companies would never agree to give people enforceable privacy protections; it would destroy their "business".
The way to save journalism, especially local news, is to regulate "Big Tech" middlemen, who generally do not employ journalists and produce zero content.1 The quality of journalism in general has taken a nosedive, but placing the blame for that on web users not purchasing subscriptions is conveniently ignoring the true culprit.
1. Arguably that's a prerequisite to maintaining their Section 230 protection. In the recent Supreme Court oral arguments, Google's counsel argued Google is not a publisher. Then minutes later she argued Google has to make design decisions "like any publisher", therefore Google gets a free pass to reorganise information in annoying and perhaps harmful ways to maximise ad services revenue, like inserting "popular" videos into YouTube search results that have nothing to do with the query string.
"Proposals like the PACT Act would state that if a provider is aware of an unlawful post, it will lose immunity for a lawsuit premised on that specific post.334"
"The CASE-IT Act would have taken a similar approach, providing that service providers and users lose Section 230(c)(1) immunity for a year if they engage in certain activities, including permitting harmful content to be distributed to minors, if the harmful content is made readily accessible to minors by the failure of such provider or user to implement a system designed to effectively screen users who are minors from accessing such content.337"
"In the same vein, other bills would have caused providers to lose Section 230 immunity if they use algorithms to distribute content to users or display behavioral advertising.338"
There’s no such thing as maintaining protection. It’s not something you “lose.”
The fact that seems least likely to change is that most "paywalls" rely on Javascript, CSS or some other "feature" of so-called "modern" web browsers.
I have lost count of how many times an HN comment alleges "paywalled" in a thread and I am reading the article just like any other because I am not using a graphical web browser. I would not even know there was a "paywall". Paywalls have dependencies.
* { overflow: visible !important; }
Not sure why this 'hack' is on the front-page.
No idea how it works but it looks like actual content is loaded separately once the gates are open?
I also have one to kill all running javascript and remove all event listeners, it works wonders when you are redirected to a paywall / login page after a few seconds.
This is supposed to be saved as a Javascript Bookmarklet?
Yes, I'm using it as a bookmarklet. I'm using firefox but I think it should work the same for other browsers.
This.
In the print days, you'd buy a newspaper; you'd have access to all the articles in that edition. I used to read a daily paper.
In the modern world, these papers expect you to pay for a newspaper just to read a single article. I dunno, perhaps they could form a "Paywall Consortium", so that I could pay a one-day fee to the consortium, and have access to Washpo, Telegraph, NYT etc. for 24 hours. Let the consortium figure out how to distribute the fees - it's not my concern.
But if you want me to buy the whole paper to read a single article, well, ain't gonna happen.
This was common for non-subscribers in the print days. Newspapers would print a number of enticing headlines and images on the front page above the fold, and display those folded newspapers for sale at dispensers, newsstands, and stores. Many people who bought a one-off paper would buy for a single article that interested them.
Even cached/archived versions these days tend to not include the whole text. Basically: they figured out how to make a paywall, which frankly isn't that surprising.
There are so many ways to do a paywall and you’ll still see all sorts of flavors across the web today.
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean...
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...
Publishers are slowly wising up, though. Most don't load the full article for unpaid viewers anymore.
Guess they caught on to the "cheaters."
As soon as your site sends the whole content of the article to the browser, you're not even trying seriously. (And Firefox "reading mode" is just much better ux than the devtools.)
That is usually due to an "overflow: hidden" somewhere near the top of the DOM tree. Remove that and your normal scrollbar usually returns. You see this a lot with "accept being stalked to read this" pop-overs as well as paywall related shenanigans.
I've seen some sites put it back in via JS. There is probably a workaround for that too though the easiest one is to not worry about it and DNS blacklist the site so you don't waste time visiting it again in future.
Just press that, select the paywall (and any other junk backdrops/opaque divs), and press delete.
Sometimes the site also sets an `overflow: hidden` in the css, and you need to remove that to see the content..
For those cases try something like Google Cache or Wayback Machine! It still won't always work, but it's nevertheless got a pretty good success rate.
I created https://turbolink.io to attempt to solve this problem.
