Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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]
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.
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.
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.
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/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.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
crinkly|7 months ago
We need to keep making more of these.
nehal3m|7 months ago
https://archive.ph/dSeku
open-paren|7 months ago
https://github.com/carterworks/yazzy
1vuio0pswjnm7|7 months ago
https://commoncrawl.org
I would prefer more of these.
Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
CjHuber|7 months ago
0x5FC3|7 months ago
yegle|7 months ago
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.
yesfitz|7 months ago
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.
m82labs|7 months ago
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
phoronixrly|7 months ago
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.
abxyz|7 months ago
commandar|7 months ago
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.
dkarl|7 months ago
lanewinfield|7 months ago
jlarocco|7 months ago
Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
sn9|7 months ago
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.
yorwba|7 months ago
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.
pseudocomposer|7 months ago
In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.
Workaccount2|7 months ago
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.
piva00|7 months ago
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...
hombre_fatal|7 months ago
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.
HumblyTossed|7 months ago
Arubis|7 months ago
morkalork|7 months ago
BizarroLand|7 months ago
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.
humblebeekeeper|7 months ago
I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
mrkramer|7 months ago
Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
Gys|7 months ago
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.
micromacrofoot|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
robswc|7 months ago
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
NicuCalcea|7 months ago
alfon|7 months ago
joenot443|7 months ago
"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
Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
morkalork|7 months ago
reactordev|7 months ago
Great work.
Arubis|7 months ago
manquer|7 months ago
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/...
gnabgib|7 months ago
varispeed|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
pentagrama|7 months ago
[1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
[2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
NelsonMinar|7 months ago
musha68k|7 months ago
krunck|7 months ago
tyzoid|7 months ago
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
Arubis|7 months ago
Aurornis|7 months ago
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
geegee3|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
corny|7 months ago
Raed667|7 months ago
strongpigeon|7 months ago
spicyusername|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
rckt|7 months ago
Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
toader|7 months ago
lovelearning|7 months ago
drcongo|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
floppiplopp|7 months ago
toader|7 months ago
varelse|7 months ago
[deleted]