[HN Gopher] 12ft.io Taken Down
___________________________________________________________________
12ft.io Taken Down
Author : afeuerstein
Score : 109 points
Date : 2025-07-21 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newsmediaalliance.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newsmediaalliance.org)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Small discussion (29 points, 4 days ago, 6 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601344
| 0x5FC3 wrote:
| 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?
| morkalork wrote:
| 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
| 0x5FC3 wrote:
| Just make the button work on the 3rd click, and count the
| other 2 as ad clicks.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Those of us old enough to remember newspapers hated when they
| did that.
|
| Or, wait...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only
| some people will see things that everyone should read.
|
| The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall
| being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some
| other business that already bought papers, or you buying the
| paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for
| newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are
| catastrophically high compared to web hosting.
|
| I think the major issue is two-fold:
|
| 1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their
| content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable
| from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that
| does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to
| indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or
| three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing
| to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your
| product further.
|
| 2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for
| their reporting again, the quality needs to go _up_
| substantially. I don 't recall the last time I read an
| article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and
| didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos.
| Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright
| incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to
| slow because good product takes time to make, and being first
| if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.
|
| To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to
| dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover
| everything first no matter how shitty the cited information
| is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and
| just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you
| need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.
|
| The only other solution I can picture is independent news
| organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not
| beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own
| government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll
| cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
| tempnew wrote:
| "subscriptions like Apple News"
|
| They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix,
| Amazon prime, etc... Paying a subscription to prevent ads is
| like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don't come
| back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek
| growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a
| multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly
| poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
| useless_foghorn wrote:
| I'd partake in a microtransaction system that pays based on
| the percentage of the article I finished. Some assurance of
| high-quality journalism would be helpful. If HN existed as
| pay-to-play for instance (it probably wouldn't), I wouldn't
| be opposed to paying based on my usage for the curation -
| knowing that I'm supporting the creators/authors of the
| content I'm enjoying. I don't think an unlimited plan makes
| sense - instead pay per article. I think the amount you pay
| per should be chosen when you create your account, not every
| time you open an article. I think this is most fair to the
| creators and consumers with the least organizational bloat.
| abxyz wrote:
| The solution is comfort in going without.
| snihalani wrote:
| I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you
| get a share for views
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for
| ~99% of artists on it
| jennyholzer wrote:
| Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use
| it for income.
|
| Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out
| to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host
| in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams
| which that work generates.
|
| E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If
| Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those
| streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund
| for 2024.
|
| Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting
| "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers.
| this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music
| styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the
| Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's
| Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-
| in-the-machin...) for more details on this.
|
| Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music,
| and tunes their automated recommendation features to
| prioritize this music.
|
| This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of
| streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing
| the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot
| be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding
| the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic
| an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
| Supermancho wrote:
| The fun and innovation of circumvention will never get old.
| There is no comfort to be had in stagnation.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Note that this, like ad blocking or piracy, also doesn't help
| fund the creators.
| commandar wrote:
| 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.
| jhaile wrote:
| I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to
| read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click
| "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| this creates massive incentives for clickbait
| mrkramer wrote:
| No....because you would get to see preview of the article
| and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you
| would do it.
| sonofaragorn wrote:
| That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave
| team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-
| rewards/
| commandar wrote:
| Kinda?
|
| The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as
| "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind
| even if the _rest_ of the ecosystem theoretically works in
| functionally the same way.
|
| In my mind, the entire point is to get away from
| advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I _want_ to pay
| for the things I consume. If the advertising market has
| decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket
| change, I 'd far rather just give that money to the
| publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the
| equation.
|
| The core idea behind BAT isn't _bad_ , but the marketing is
| pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
| bb88 wrote:
| > The core idea behind BAT isn't bad
|
| I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of
| the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much
| data from the population really be? We're sharing our
| profits!"
| Arubis wrote:
| 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?
| yesfitz wrote:
| 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.
| dkarl wrote:
| 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!"
| phoronixrly wrote:
| 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_.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a
| decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between
| users and advertisers.
|
| 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.
| stonogo wrote:
| You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own
| ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as
| 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes
| of many.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of
| asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-
| opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me
| bail from them.
|
| If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in
| which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static
| images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would
| have helped their case a lot.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| Except its a bit like that PERL quote.
|
| You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get
| people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting,
| art, community and positive externalities.
|
| You think, I know, i'll use ads!
|
| Now you have two problems.
| cwillu wrote:
| My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell
| it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long
| ABP.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| I'm fine with this approach as long as it goes both ways.
| The media organisation's server is theirs, and if they want
| to put up a paywall or block clients with ad blockers,
| that's their prerogative.
| yegle wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
|
| 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.
| lblume wrote:
| So instead of contributing to authors, you need to
| altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to
| Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert?
| Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why
| this was discontinued...
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're
| paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and
| bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers
| gets converted to cash for the website.
|
| Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly,
| instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that
| cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
| recursive wrote:
| "Large portion"? I don't think it says that.
| lblume wrote:
| Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and
| it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that
| their margin will have to also be paid by the person who
| donates, for else the calculation will not work.
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| I just check reuters and apnews first these days to see
| what's going on before checking localized stuff.
| piva00 wrote:
| 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...
| jlarocco wrote:
| I think that argument is begging the question.
|
| Media consumption habits changed because that's how the
| internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because
| anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences
| were.
|
| After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I
| don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news
| articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a
| couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets,
| etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them.
| There's too much garbage on the internet, and I _want_ the
| gatekeeping.
|
| I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position,
| though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but
| rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random
| site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the
| news sites I pay for.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| Scroll ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) )
| was attempting to solve this exact issue.
| m82labs wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a
| price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a
| price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd
| have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never
| succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're
| not.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find
| valuable and ignore the rest.
|
| Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
| crinkly wrote:
| https://archive.ph/
|
| We need to keep making more of these.
| nehal3m wrote:
| This article was archived 4 days ago. :-)
|
| https://archive.ph/dSeku
| CjHuber wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled
| content.
| x______________ wrote:
| Or create a deeper underground where the masses do not get
| involved?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The dirty secret is that the news media _needs_
| archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an
| article about subject Y needs to know what every paper
| wrote about it. Back in the 00 's it got out that you could
| log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media",
| something that got clamped down on when it got out.
|
| You'd think _The New York Times_ could afford to get a
| subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but
| there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that
| they 're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most
| smaller papers are such marginal operations that they
| couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall.
| It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of
| _New York Times_ articles are written by freelancers who
| have no real connection with the organization and it 's
| even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a
| shoestring.
|
| If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
| Marsymars wrote:
| There's no real way to tell if the content you share today
| will be paywalled tomorrow.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org
|
| 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.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| The Internet Archive is significantly less useful because
| they allow people to exclude their public social media
| accounts or websites. On a couple occasions I have tried to
| find a source for old deleted statements using the IA only to
| find that the data had been scrubbed. Fortunately
| archive.today still had a copy in one case, but in the other
| one I was out of luck.
| cobertos wrote:
| What were you looking for that was prone to scrubbing? Just
| curious because I have a collection of historical data to
| go through and don't know what to expect
| pseudo0 wrote:
| In one case it was a personal website, the other was a
| Twitter account. Both got scrubbed from the IA.
|
| Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests,
| I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those
| cases.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_ge
| t_p...
|
| https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-
| site-...
| musha68k wrote:
| Streisand amplification in effect.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Was it ever publicly communicated how 12ft or archive.ph|is work?
| Or is it something they keep to themselves ?
| strongpigeon wrote:
| I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating
| Googlebot.
| beejiu wrote:
| That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for
| its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers
| these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).
| Raed667 wrote:
| doesn't google also run some "undercover" bots to verify
| that you don't serve very different versions of your
| website to users vs bots ?
| ewoodrich wrote:
| In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a
| honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so
| I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work
| with almost everything but at some point major news orgs
| caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering
| to try it.
| cesarb wrote:
| > they were just impersonating Googlebot.
|
| Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to
| require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal
| users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still
| enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from
| its index.
| alfon wrote:
| https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
| reactordev wrote:
| Not me jumping to the link only to realize I already have it
| stared ;)
|
| Great work.
| Arubis wrote:
| Fabulous naming choice.
| manquer wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-
| indexing/...
| morkalork wrote:
| It can't be that easy, can it? Doesn't google bot have known ip
| ranges that publishers whitelist?
| phoronixrly wrote:
| It's not. In my experience they even completely block non-
| end-user IP ranges, and I'm not fond of being raided due to
| running this at home.
| joenot443 wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067
|
| Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
| geegee3 wrote:
| It hadn't worked for a long time.
| varispeed wrote:
| I would understand if media were actually working - reporting on
| local issues, exposing corruption or where things are not working
| for residents.
|
| 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.
| krunck wrote:
| I'm not paying for subscriptions. I'll pay per article or not at
| all.
| tyzoid wrote:
| 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.
| Arubis wrote:
| There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of
| course.
| dwb wrote:
| They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies
| them for me.
| Arubis wrote:
| Interesting--that hasn't been my experience. I have a _lot_
| of filtering layers; one or more of them might be catching
| those.
| vunderba wrote:
| This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic,
| New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and
| immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing
| ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| Like Spotify and how big name artists/record labels shaft all
| the individual content creators when it comes to revenue
| sharing. I do pay for Spotify regardless, I would pay about
| the same for the written equivalent. Not sure if that would
| be enough to sustain any real investigative journalism though
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > How many sites would you end up splitting that across?
|
| For news? Two, I guess.
|
| My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their
| local reporters, and then AP stuff.
| immibis wrote:
| Yes? If they show me one page per year, they can get a few
| cents per year. That's how it works. If they want more money,
| they should produce more content worth viewing.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| humblebeekeeper wrote:
| Ok, I guess I won't read content from News Media Alliance
| outlets. I think they are probably fine with that.
|
| I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when
| it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
| Gys wrote:
| > replaced by microtransactions
|
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yea, micropayments but people can't keep up with dozens
| subscriptions. Someone will figure out micropayments sooner
| or later.
| robswc wrote:
| 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.
| pentagrama wrote:
| Bypass Paywalls Clean extension [1] still working and getting
| updates [2].
|
| [1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
|
| [2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-
| fire...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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.
| corny wrote:
| 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.
| rckt wrote:
| Not sure how is this illegal. It's like saying that listening to
| a song that is played anywhere, but your paid service is illegal.
|
| Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just
| motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck
| with paywalls.
| lovelearning wrote:
| 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.
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