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Comment by arcboii92 | Hacker News Reader

Aside from: clearing cookies, having to reopen news articles you've already half read in incognito, or adding an additional '.' (like "nytimes.com./blah"); what are some of the other ways people are getting around paywalls?

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Personally, I do just clear cookies, but I've found a good Firefox extension that does it well for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-cookie...

It has a convenient button that clears all the storage for the page in the current window. It remove the cookies, local storage and session storage. Then I just reload the pay-walled page and it thinks I'm a new visitor.

Adding "outline.com/" before the url sometimes works.

At least wsj.com does not work anymore on outline. Maybe HN can bundle all those paywalled sites and sell a subscription.

Use a WSJ link from Bitly into Outline and it works again...

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

There's a Chrome equivalent as well

archive.is is fairly foolproof for me

I have this trick where I just pay for high quality, well researched news because I'm an adult and I realize that not everything should be free and maybe we should pay for some things.

People on HN like to complain about paying in data to use Google and Facebook and yet also consider it an affront that they have to pay money to journalists.

True, i would agree.

If only paying for high quality news and articles guaranteed me that i won't see ads, well at least non-js ads.

Sadly that won't happen because people who can pay for such news have higher disposable income and are better target for advertisers.

Which one do you pay for? All of them? How do you determine high quality? How do you reconcile the fact that you need to pay before you can read it, thus not being able to evaluate the quality properly? How do you reconcile saying a large news publication produces quality with the amount of errors that are frequently and egregiously present in articles with any sort of depth?

I agree with the opening question but I find latter part of the argument unreasonable. You will encounter many, many services in life that require an initial payment. Pay once and then decide whether you want to keep on paying for more. This applies to restaurants, movies, hotels, taxis, etc. The initial payment for pay-walled articles is usually quite small. If you don't know where to start you can always ask a friend, read a review, or join an online community.

I opened and closed with the questions what were to me most relevant, which is my mistake as I should have front-loaded both. Your answer is reasonable, except it glosses over the fact that the quality is bad and this is a pervasive issue.

Yup this

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