Ask HN: Do you pay to read news articles online? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you pay to read news articles online?

3 pointsg4zj5 comments

Like many people, I often find myself clicking through to a news article, only to see that a subscription is required in order to read it, or that I have some small number of free articles remaining.

When this happens, I immediately think to myself "why would I ever pay to read articles from any single news source?". I prefer to read articles from multiple sources on the same subject or event, but refuse to pay for numerous subscriptions.

Do you subscribe to any news sites or services? Do you use clever tricks to circumvent paywalls?

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Use either Archive or 12-foot Ladder to see pay-walled articles. If you can't see the article that way, just boycott it.

https://archive.is/

https://12ft.io/

I keep these two bookmarks on my bookmarks bar, then cut and paste the article's URL into the input fields

News monetization sucks. I pay for a handful of news sources because I believe news is important and should not (always) be ad-sponsored.

But even the sites I pay for, I usually access through some rip-off layer to avoid the hassle of logging in and/or evading the tracking that news sites often seem to insist upon.

I value online news at near zero, so I don't pay. In many cases, if there's any friction like a paywall I just move on. I'm not professionally gathering info or reading out of some special need, I'm just browsing so it's not really vital if I don't get to read something. If I'm slightly more interested I use archive to bypass the paywall.

Ironically, most websites with stuff I actually might need, like documentation, are not paywalled. Likewise, most good analysis I see around is in blogs or personal posts that are free. Monetized online "content" usually sucks.

No, but I have been tempted. News is everywhere.

I typically go to archive.today[0] for paywalled articles. It does some voodoo behind the scenes to show you the unpaywalled article. Also it helps if you browse with a VPN and rotate to different IPs all the time so you don't max out the amount you can read with a singular IP.

[0] https://archive.ph/

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