F*** Paywalls (opens in new tab)

News vendors don't want you to pay for individual articles you're interested in.

They want you to pay for all the articles, including the shitty ones, every month.

I'm still trying to get reimbursement for the first 20 years of my life watching shitty commercials having grown up in the 70's.

There's still too much of friction in current payment systems to be dealt with (along with subscription models) vs. ad model. And I guess it's also telling of the actual worth of the news and opinions. We just consume too much inactionable information, mostly to entertain or distract ourselves.

Academic press let's you do that, but it's insanely expensive for each article you want to read.

Greed or not, it's always going to be a bit more than a price you would accept.

Nobody will accept real micro payments. It is a pipe dream. As soon as such monetization system is deployed the prices will start at 5$ to read an article and will increase even more in the subsequent years. Why? Because people will pay.

Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).

One reason: it wouldn't be a penny. You're off by a factor of probably 100.

This only works with: 1. Common authenticated and identy system 2. That system makes the payments, already linked to your source eg card or bank

I.e. you need something like WeChat pay or Alipay. Can't work in the west. PayPal sucks

> 20 years of World Wide Web

30.

I don’t think the economics of that would work for big publications. Maybe at 5-10 cents per article they would.

control of money. It's not a lack of solutions but the people who control money make the solutions illegal , because taxation / terrorism / child porn / the usual

Because all payment processors want 2% + 0.x per transaction.

This is seemingly what Brave wants to do.

I just saw an interesting model on Substack: pay to comment. That might weed out the spammers and trolls quite effectively and build up a community of truly interested parties that have something to contribute.

I like that!

Another thing that bothers me is that I have to subscribe to all pages separately and that the price of the individual venues is just too high. News are too important to lock in with one or maybe two providers, sorry.

Take, for instance, Urban Sports Club where I have a number of plans and for amount X I get, let's say, unlimited gym, 2x sauna and a yoga session per month at their partners. Why not having this for news and other media? Like paying 50€ and you get 25 articles at partnering news sites, 10 hours Spotify and 5 hours Youtube premium.

The flaw with all this is that it is lacking the lock-in effect and let's be honest, competition is only cool if you're not exposed to it ;)

And flood literally every website with affiliate links produced by scripts. After a few years of the program the 99% of tip flows will be concentrated for a handful of best "influencers" and the rest will see some funny microscopic numbers. Then tip amounts will be adjusted based on the top earners (down of course) and the rest will see shift of amounts into nanodollars.

Articles are shared so quickly nowadays, the 'making it public when they get enough tips' might not happen fast enough and it'd be the same experience for most people...

You’re making people pay to see the non-quality content. And curate.

Moreover we don't want to use big payment processors and we don't want crypto.

Ahh ahh! I know this one! I've read enough HN comments to know the answer.

1) Anything that was done for monetary gain on the internet was inherently bad and it's no loss if it goes away

2) People will just magically decide to keep creating content out of the goodness of their own hearts

The irony is that someone paid for a 3 letters domain + infrastructure to keep this running for free.

If you make one solution impossible, another one pops up.

>how are websites supposed to stay afloat?

They're not. If no one wants to pay for it then it's not supposed to exist, speaking in terms of how the capitalist system is supposed to work

archive.ph is captcha hell if you use Cloudflare DNS because drama: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680

For all of 12ft.io’s bluster it seems that they turn it off politely if the target site asks which means it doesn’t accomplish anything at all. Archive.ph needs to do something about the CAPTCHAs but maybe that is what they have to to shed load so they can afford to run it.

That would need to involve more than the DNS. The browser expects to see the certificate for a specific website so you can't just redirect. The certificate needs to be forged. I don't think that is doable without a personal proxy server. In some cases, the browser may allow you to accept an invalid certificate but many sites forbid that via the HTTP Strict Transport Security mechanism. So you will need a proxy server plus a self-signed certificate authority installed in the browser or operating system.

A service could work but would need to work around TLS. It would either need to provide you a root CA certificate to install on your systems (bad idea as it would allow them to MITM any website), or a bundle of certificates for the hostnames of the news websites they support (so the MITM is constrained to those domains, but that's fine as that's your intention anyway).

Can you give one example of state propaganda that is behind paywall?

Some paywalls can be bypassed by turning off the Javascript. For example, the paywall on Epoch Times. Not so for Wall Street Journal.

It doesn't have the be different, it just has to be interesting so we can talk about it, right? Come on, it's Saturday, let's just discuss the thing based on its own merits.

fresh ip addresses after those get blocked?

But I wonder if it's not always intentional as maybe ad blockers kill some of paywalls some times?

Exactly, just like I expect to get paid for my work. I want a simple way to pay for all the pay walls in aggregate so I'm not signing up for 27 different subscriptions and I read one article from each source. I'm not against paying, I'm against a huge pile of bullshit management.

The internet will also collapse when everything has turned into ad-optimized clickbait.

There is no shortage of brilliant people who are happy to share their creative work for free. Remember blogs and RSS? They were great. Static pages don't cost anything to host either.

I reject your false choice.

Most of the internet is duplicative crap, made way more easy to generate via AI now.

One person writes the article and 1000 people copy it.

The only way to solve that would be for Google to be smart enough to only link to original sources and not reposts.

Then at least we are rewarding original thinkers and could concentrate our attention (and money) there.

Those are far from the only options available. Recently platforms such as patreon have shown that it is completely feasible for a small subset of enthusiastic fans to financially support some creator that makes their content freely available to anyone with an internet connection. And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time, so acting like those people don't exist in spades just because a bunch of rent-seeking content farms have entered the field in recent years is ludicrous.

The problem is that paying is almost never anonymous, and there are still many places in the world where consuming the wrong text makes you a quasi-criminal.

We wanted music withóut paying for CDs.

Internet content is largely non exclusive and infinitely replicable.

Even the RIAA gave up and embraced the web, if begrudgingly.

Single edition single article news is simply a different type of good/product on the web. When publishers realise this and do what Spotify/QQ have done for pop music, then they'll get the additional revenue they seek.

The fundamental problem is that you can't unread an article if you don't like it, and get your money back.

A complicating factor: I think the people frustrated with Paywalls are often not browsing the website directly: A friend or relative sends you a link "hey check this out", or someone posts an article on a news aggregator site to spark discussion. You either hold the escape key after a refresh so you can chat with your mom about the article, or cut right to the comments section of the aggregator site and post something insightful based on the title.

The internet existed before paywalls or ads.

Maybe not in its current form where faang gets to make billions loads of services are free, but fundamentally it can exist

I have a feeling there's a but of point-missing going on. The authors are not really getting paid for their work; modern copyright is a get-rich-cheme for rights-holding corporations. (I write 13 books and netted a few hundred for it. All the rest was bagged by the publishers.) Resisting paywalls is not resisting the idea that the authors should get something for their work. It's resisting an double exploitation structure, where networks monopolize, enshittify, and bleed dry everyone they can get their hands on - authors, readers, advertisers, subjects, everyone. That this is so is easily shown_ take structures where the actual authors get paidm and people pay voluntarily. Patreon is still a fairly good example for this: people do their work, put it online for free, and people still pay for it (and some bonus content), for the joy of listening to it/watching it/whatever.

Boomers who don't know what ad block is can subsidize everything. They already own 50% of all the wealth.

The issue is the paywalls preventing access to information. Information should be available to everybody, regardless of whether or not they have the means to pay for it. Imo, it's best to have paid features that are not expected to be provided for free that helps pay for the free features or if going the advertisement route, make advertisements that are non-obtrusive and don't make the user's experience worse.

Looks like they use some sort of proxy:

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%...

Typically news sites rate limit how much a particular IP can be used to read articles. I assume the proxy IP is different each time.