Show HN: Built an extension to put an end to paywalls and popups | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Built an extension to put an end to paywalls and popups

chrome.google.com

39 pointsadawg439 comments

> This alpha version is free until we release beta!

This implies that you will, at some point, be charging a fee to remove revenue from other sites. Does this not border on unethical business practice?

To clarify the paid option will let publishers verify ownership of their sites and then get what they may have lost by ppl using the extension with adblock.

Seriously? Do you even understand how ridiculous that sounds?

"We destroyed your business model. For a small fee, we will be happy to un-destroy it."

This sounds like Brave browser's model (minus the crypto). How do you plan on handling small payments for millions of websites?

Isn't this exactly what adbock's white-listed ads are, except you are going to physically collect on one side and distribute on the other side? The adblock business model is rightfully hated garbage but at least it's efficient...

Is it unethical to sell a cure for a disease that another company is profiting off of by selling a side-effect suppressing medicine?

Or to sell a wide-range solution to a problem, for which previously only peacemeal solutions were available on the market?

I believe these questions are no different from yours, and that all of those are ethical; if the site needs to keep track of some balance that I would have on that site, they should make me create an account before ever showing an article.

Note that I'm not advocating for piracy / circumvention of DRM, but against the 'you have read your 3 free articles this month, please create an account'-pattern. If you offer free articles without an explicit user account, you should not be suprised that the anonymous user expects those articles to be free and uses workarounds to get past the toll gates.

Seems as ethical or not as ABP's responsible ads whitelist.

Is it ethical to force paywalls on users, or to serve ads?

It's an inherently subjective question.

Nice work! I would appreciate this more if it were available in the form of a uBlock list, rather than a standalone (and apparently pre-monetization) browser extension.

And to everyone who's complaining about 'stealing revenue': buzz off. It's a user agent, not a vendor agent. Screw these popups and nagware and screw your website which uses them.

Yeah, I take a pretty simple policy to ads.

If you run your own ad platform from first-party code and you audit the process for ad inclusion as well as the code running the network to ensure only static ads from vetted partners, we're good and I won't block. Otherwise, block.

Blame Forbes. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3021113/forbes-malware-...

I subscribe to various annoyance block lists; they have the same goal as pophurdle (hiding banners and notices and crap like that), only they are already established projects, work in browsers other than Chrome, have no intention of eventually screwing over the end user, and are community maintained.

https://github.com/easylist/easylist/tree/master/fanboy-addo...

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/tree/master/An...

This post is not directed at parent, but the general HN reader who might be tempted to try pophurdle. Use uBlock Origin instead. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation

Instead of paying Pop Hurdle $4.99/month to remove other sites attempts to pay their bills, you could pay Scroll $4.99/month ($2.49 for the first six months) to remove all ads from Scroll's partner sites who then receive a cut of that $2.49 (minus Scroll's cut). This cut is reportedly more per-user than publishers typically get from ads per-user.

https://scroll.com/

Disclosure: Mozilla is partnering with Scroll to create a Scroll Firefox extension ("Firefox Better Web"): https://firstlook.firefox.com/betterweb/

> This does NOT close out of "hard" blockers that require payment to view content because that is illegal.

This implies that "soft" blockers like this aren't illegal, which is a topic of debate and to my knowledge hasn't been legally tested.

I dislike paywalls as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't assume that paywall bypasses are kosher. It's not analogous with ad blocking.

> which is a topic of debate

No it's not. Nobody is debating this. Even if people were, it's literally impossible to enforce so it doesn't matter (unless your moral conscience is influenced by the law)

Sure, it's neither feasible nor practical to sue individual users for using paywall bypassing tools, but a service with a distinct company presence that could potentially monetize said paywall bypassing would be a probable target for a C&D.

Fair point, will try to make the subscription option give back percentages to the publishers to help them deal with adblocker by letting them claim it. If this is something you're into, lmk!

This is supposed to bypass soft paywalls. Then with a subscription model, you're going to pay back the site that had its soft paywall blocked by your software?

The subscription model is up for debate, would be a way to give peeps a better alternative to having paywalls in the first place as they would induce more traffic loss that way.

"Sorry about the revenue my paid tool took from your website. Here's a pittance, thanks for not suing me."

You can have a debate on anything, but please explain how me closing a popup in my own browser could be illegal? Going around paywall would be unauthorized access, but dismissing popup - either manually or automatically - is not that, since I am clearly authorized to see the content beyond the popup, it being in public and all.

This extension offers a subset of the functionality of open source extensions like stylus and ublock, and the store page is terrible. How exactly did this get on the front page of HN?

> We only use statistical data which is provided via Google Analytics. We may collect non-personal identification information about Users whenever they interact with our service.

Could you explain a bit more about that without having to send you an email?

Data collected (ip, browser..) and for how long for example.

"Users" is how many people have it installed and how many sites it has blocked so far, not the people specifically using the extension. Im not touching anyone's ip data nor do I want to. Probably going to dump it monthly if possible because its only for tracking basic KPIs. Ill switch if there's a privacy-based alternative.

If "collect data about users" is supposed to mean "how many users", then maybe amend it to say "collect data (only) about the number of users"?

Will do!

>> As we test the alpha version of pophurdle, we are offering it free of charge! May not even be paid in the end also and continue to be free.

The wording here is weirdly casual and wishy-washy. I'd never pay for this add-on, but if someone is considering helping you alpha test it they might want a little firmer future commitment.

Combined with your answers in this thread I think you should slow down and consider some of the questions and concerns comments have brought up. Your responses are inconsistent and somewhat concerning.

Charging for a plugin like this is kinda stupid. If people don't want to pay for the content why do they want to pay for your plugin? Then you end up in an arms race with content providers who will block your methods leaving you with pissed off paying users.

It seems like yet another step in escalating adwars. I am very much in the anti adtech corner, but I can't help but wonder where it is going to lead us.

Why do websites have pay walls? Maybe because they want to earn money. You are now gonna take it from them. A dirty shady business I call it.

What's dirty is clogging up search results with paywalled articles. If they don't show it to users unless the users have payed, they shouldn't show it to search engine crawlers either.

What are the best resources to learn how to structure a Chrome Extension? I find the API very difficult to grok.

Heres a whole repo of extension examples you can probably work with https://github.com/orbitbot/chrome-extensions-examples

The https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/devguide is easy to parse and the https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/samples are quite useful to kickstart the development of a Chrome extension.

> how to structure a Chrome Extension

In the true spirit of JavaScript, you just structure it however you damn well please. Well, not completely, usually you have a background page, a popup page with associated scripts, an options page, optional content scripts, etc. You can learn from examples but in general they’re just structured in whatever way the author feels like.

> I find the API very difficult to grok.

That’s surprising because most APIs are really simple as long as you’re comfortable with callbacks. Sometimes there’s a bit of trial and error (messaging might be one pain point when you write your first extension), and sometimes details might slightly differ from the docs as certain features are tightened up (usually in the name of security), but I’ve never encountered anything that defies a bit of debugging.

Isn't there an uBlock Origin thing for this? uBlock Origin Extra.

The goal of this is to supercharge any adblocker and not specifically uBlock. At the moment pophurdle has a few main site types it can work with and will eventually work for most! Its currently in alpha.

Ideally I want as few extensions modifying a page as possible, for speed purposes. Having a different engine parsing, matching strings, and editing each site must be slower than having one that does everything well.

Just to present an alternative for anyone looking for this kind of thing, I've been using this free Chrome extension for the last couple months and it works like a charm https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

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