F*** Paywalls

[ArtTimeInvestor]

20 years of World Wide Web and we still don't have micropayments so we can just pay a penny to read an article.

Why does it take us so long?

[Hackbraten]

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.

[bastard_op]

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.

[high_5]

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.

[methou]

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.

[Yizahi]

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).

[jmull]

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

[rakkhi]

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

[shric]

> 20 years of World Wide Web

30.

[jakeinspace]

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

[seydor]

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

[candiddevmike]

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

[insanitybit]

This is seemingly what Brave wants to do.

[zeta0134]

Here's a thought... Why not let the paying subscribers promote content they especially like to the commons?

So, if you're a paying member, you get to read everything like it works today. But you also get a steady flow of tips. If you like an article, you can tip the author directly, which comes out of your monthly subscription. Once a given article gets enough tips, it's permanently unlocked for every visitor.

Basically, good quality content goes public, letting the readers both curate the content and help out those for whom a full subscription is not in the budget.

Thoughts?

[high_5]

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.

[luoc]

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 ;)

[Yizahi]

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.

[scumola]

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...

[eastbound]

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

[not_your_vase]

We don't want to pay and we don't want to watch ads - still, we want to consume the content. I mean, I get the sentiment, I also share it to a great degree. But how are websites supposed to stay afloat?

[raincole]

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

[dageshi]

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

[_ahxg]

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

[mach1ne]

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

[stemlord]

>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

[8chanAnon]

Would be nice to see the source code for this. Then I could write up my own app to do the same. We shouldn't need to be dependent on a website that could shut down at any time.

[alephnerd]

Doesn't work for most stuff anymore either. I've been using this after archive.ph became captcha hell and 12ft.io got blocked

[DanAtC]

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

[PaulHoule]

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.

[jimaek]

Is there a service like this that could work on a DNS level?

I'm using a DNS ad blocker and I could set-up overrides of certain news websites to a different hostname which in turn would redirect to the bypass URL.

It sounds doable but I haven't seen anything like that

[8chanAnon]

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.

[Nextgrid]

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).

[swader999]

The craziest is paying for state propaganda. Hard no.

[vodou]

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

[spacebacon]

Jeff Johnson's stopthescript and stopthemadness safari plugin for ios and mac os bypasses most paywalls and actually disables javascript. Inline included.

[8chanAnon]

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

[bogota]

How is this different from archive.org?

[lagniappe]

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.

[paulpauper]

fresh ip addresses after those get blocked?

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

This appears to be an HTTP proxy. What does this have to do with paywalls.

Please name one website whose paywall can be bypassed using this proxy.

[baby]

Be like me. Flag every paywall article that ends up on hackernews

[_ahxg]

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

[insanitybit]

lol what do people expect? You say you want a web without ads, now you want a web without paywalls. Sorry, but... pick one. Or watch as the internet collapses.

[yCombLinks]

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.

[gizmo]

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.

[ec109685]

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.

[mostlylurks]

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.

[greentea23]

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.

[sidcool]

How does the tech work? How do they bypass the paywall?

[sysadm1n]

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.