Technology

What if, and this may be shocking to some, but what if you live in a rich country and you're dirt poor?

That model works great if you tend to get your news primarily from one news source. If you don't, then that's a lot of subscriptions, and especially if you want to go look at a local news article that got linked somewhere for a town you don't even live in. Most of the time I don't even want to register an account, let alone set up a subscription.

I've never come across a single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I've ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn't like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we're clear, I'm not saying that I don't to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it's worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it's worth it etc.

But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on some random science journal) isn't something that I'm really interested in pursuing a subscription for, just because I stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I'll subscribe just because of one random article... that's just shitty business.

Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say "hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!". I mean, that makes sense. I'd then go, "yep, this site has quality content and the type of content I'd like to read, so it's worth subscribing to".

But no, instead they're like "heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking you to pay for a whole month's worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn't going to put you off, right?"

My hot take is that we need more journalists on the NPR / local affiliate model. People should pledge to their local journalists, no news hidden behind subscriptions. Pay what you can, subscribers get early access to the entertainment / pop culture content, and don’t get blasted with pledge requests.

That’s my go-to technique. But I would prefer that Lifehacker was not publicizing it.

Thank you so much for telling us this!

THIS!!

Unfortunately, 12ft.io isn't nearly as effective as it used to be, likely because sites have become wise to it and tweaked their methods

I recently discovered that the Firefox add-on, ublock origin, has in its chooseable block lists, under annoyances, a cookie notice blocker with lots of other annoyance blockers as well.

You can usually get past a lot of that stuff by just using the reader mode (button in the address bar)

Consent-O-Matic for cookie pop-ups

The Ghostery extension supports auto-declining the cookie prompts.

every browser allows this

+ublock origin would let you do this

I see a paywall and I just leave and move onto the next thing