F*** Paywalls | Hacker News Reader

F*** Paywalls

1ft.io

63 pointssysadm1n88 comments

20 years of World Wide Web and we still don't have micropayments so we can just pay a penny to read an article.

Why does it take us so long?

I don’t think the economics of that would work for big publications. Maybe at 5-10 cents per article they would.

How easy the transaction is is almost more important to me than the actual cost. As long as it can be one click, I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read a good article

News vendors don't want you to pay for individual articles you're interested in.

They want you to pay for all the articles, including the shitty ones, every month.

And then cram down their bias down your throat, with you paying. Whether it’s sponsored placements or interest group’s lobbying. I mean, there is no money to make in neutrality anyway.

You think the bias is bad now? It'd be 10x worse if readers paid by the article. Have we not learned about audience capture by now?

> 20 years of World Wide Web

30.

30.5 - the Internet went commercial in the summer of '94

Eternal September was '93. I remember it well.

One reason: it wouldn't be a penny. You're off by a factor of probably 100.

Ads pay pennies though. So maybe he's merely off by a factor of 5?

How many ads will there be, though?

Also, ads aren't paying everyone's bills -- hence the paywalls -- so that number must be too low.

(Not to mention the other issue with this: in general it's not ads or micropayments/paywalls -- it's ads and micropayments/paywalls. Hell, if micropayments were feasible, it would probably be all three.)

On the VERY high end the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is what, $2? That's 0.2 cents per view. I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read the article, even up to $1 if it's a really good investigative/well-researched piece.

I'm not paying $5/outlet/month though, ever!

Humans pay more though. Nobody will be interested in collecting 1c from hundred million of unloyal readers, prone to changing information providers because then they aren't chained with a yearly sub which can be only cancelled via an international 2-3 hour call to the USA for the price of a whole sub. Journal would sooner get that money from the loyal 100000 readers who will pay 1$ per article. But wait, why do that when they can change 10-20$ per article from 10000 and throw some meaningless loyalty program to them?

Even better, do the american healthcare trick - set a price at say 1000$ per article but allow only big corpos to have some opaque bulk discounts for their employees. Thus maximizing money extraction from richest customers.

Because all payment processors want 2% + 0.x per transaction.

Which is why you need either a roll-up system, or pre-payment.

control of money. It's not a lack of solutions but the people who control money make the solutions illegal , because taxation / terrorism / child porn / the usual

I'm still trying to get reimbursement for the first 20 years of my life watching shitty commercials having grown up in the 70's.

There's still too much of friction in current payment systems to be dealt with (along with subscription models) vs. ad model. And I guess it's also telling of the actual worth of the news and opinions. We just consume too much inactionable information, mostly to entertain or distract ourselves.

This is seemingly what Brave wants to do.

Academic press let's you do that, but it's insanely expensive for each article you want to read.

Greed or not, it's always going to be a bit more than a price you would accept.

Nobody will accept real micro payments. It is a pipe dream. As soon as such monetization system is deployed the prices will start at 5$ to read an article and will increase even more in the subsequent years. Why? Because people will pay.

Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).

This only works with: 1. Common authenticated and identy system 2. That system makes the payments, already linked to your source eg card or bank

I.e. you need something like WeChat pay or Alipay. Can't work in the west. PayPal sucks

Here's a thought... Why not let the paying subscribers promote content they especially like to the commons?

So, if you're a paying member, you get to read everything like it works today. But you also get a steady flow of tips. If you like an article, you can tip the author directly, which comes out of your monthly subscription. Once a given article gets enough tips, it's permanently unlocked for every visitor.

Basically, good quality content goes public, letting the readers both curate the content and help out those for whom a full subscription is not in the budget.

Thoughts?

You’re making people pay to see the non-quality content. And curate.

I like that!

Another thing that bothers me is that I have to subscribe to all pages separately and that the price of the individual venues is just too high. News are too important to lock in with one or maybe two providers, sorry.

Take, for instance, Urban Sports Club where I have a number of plans and for amount X I get, let's say, unlimited gym, 2x sauna and a yoga session per month at their partners. Why not having this for news and other media? Like paying 50€ and you get 25 articles at partnering news sites, 10 hours Spotify and 5 hours Youtube premium.

The flaw with all this is that it is lacking the lock-in effect and let's be honest, competition is only cool if you're not exposed to it ;)

Articles are shared so quickly nowadays, the 'making it public when they get enough tips' might not happen fast enough and it'd be the same experience for most people...

I just saw an interesting model on Substack: pay to comment. That might weed out the spammers and trolls quite effectively and build up a community of truly interested parties that have something to contribute.

And flood literally every website with affiliate links produced by scripts. After a few years of the program the 99% of tip flows will be concentrated for a handful of best "influencers" and the rest will see some funny microscopic numbers. Then tip amounts will be adjusted based on the top earners (down of course) and the rest will see shift of amounts into nanodollars.

We don't want to pay and we don't want to watch ads - still, we want to consume the content. I mean, I get the sentiment, I also share it to a great degree. But how are websites supposed to stay afloat?

Moreover we don't want to use big payment processors and we don't want crypto.

Ahh ahh! I know this one! I've read enough HN comments to know the answer.

1) Anything that was done for monetary gain on the internet was inherently bad and it's no loss if it goes away

2) People will just magically decide to keep creating content out of the goodness of their own hearts

This, but non-sarcastically.

If you make one solution impossible, another one pops up.

>how are websites supposed to stay afloat?

They're not. If no one wants to pay for it then it's not supposed to exist, speaking in terms of how the capitalist system is supposed to work

The irony is that someone paid for a 3 letters domain + infrastructure to keep this running for free.

Would be nice to see the source code for this. Then I could write up my own app to do the same. We shouldn't need to be dependent on a website that could shut down at any time.

Doesn't work for most stuff anymore either. I've been using this after archive.ph became captcha hell and 12ft.io got blocked

For all of 12ft.io’s bluster it seems that they turn it off politely if the target site asks which means it doesn’t accomplish anything at all. Archive.ph needs to do something about the CAPTCHAs but maybe that is what they have to to shed load so they can afford to run it.

12ft.io is actually down for me now:

This Deployment has been disabled.

Your connection is working correctly.

Vercel is working correctly.

402: PAYMENT_REQUIRED Code: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED

> turn it off politely

Cease and desists strike again!

archive.ph is captcha hell if you use Cloudflare DNS because drama: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680

Ik. I disabled Cloudflare DNS and it's still causing issues. Until a couple weeks ago, I could disable 1.1.1.1 and check it out, but no more

Is there a service like this that could work on a DNS level?

I'm using a DNS ad blocker and I could set-up overrides of certain news websites to a different hostname which in turn would redirect to the bypass URL.

It sounds doable but I haven't seen anything like that

A service could work but would need to work around TLS. It would either need to provide you a root CA certificate to install on your systems (bad idea as it would allow them to MITM any website), or a bundle of certificates for the hostnames of the news websites they support (so the MITM is constrained to those domains, but that's fine as that's your intention anyway).

A responsible developer should never supply a pre-configured certificate (though many do exactly that). An unique certificate should be created for the specific installation.

That would need to involve more than the DNS. The browser expects to see the certificate for a specific website so you can't just redirect. The certificate needs to be forged. I don't think that is doable without a personal proxy server. In some cases, the browser may allow you to accept an invalid certificate but many sites forbid that via the HTTP Strict Transport Security mechanism. So you will need a proxy server plus a self-signed certificate authority installed in the browser or operating system.

The craziest is paying for state propaganda. Hard no.

Can you give one example of state propaganda that is behind paywall?

Le Monde. New York Times is not visibly state-funded, but it’s also political propaganda.

Others have in reply. See mocking bird, almost all are influenced by state.

The other factor is corporate influence. Most of the media is owned by the add dollars that drive it, so it's not the truth, often its what helps or at least doesn't harm the Corp that passes the filters.

Jeff Johnson's stopthescript and stopthemadness safari plugin for ios and mac os bypasses most paywalls and actually disables javascript. Inline included.

Some paywalls can be bypassed by turning off the Javascript. For example, the paywall on Epoch Times. Not so for Wall Street Journal.

True

How is this different from archive.org?

It doesn't have the be different, it just has to be interesting so we can talk about it, right? Come on, it's Saturday, let's just discuss the thing based on its own merits.

Not hating on it genuine question since i am familiar with the other product. Just want to know the pitch for why i should try it out

fresh ip addresses after those get blocked?

This appears to be an HTTP proxy. What does this have to do with paywalls.

Please name one website whose paywall can be bypassed using this proxy.

Be like me. Flag every paywall article that ends up on hackernews

But I wonder if it's not always intentional as maybe ad blockers kill some of paywalls some times?

lol what do people expect? You say you want a web without ads, now you want a web without paywalls. Sorry, but... pick one. Or watch as the internet collapses.

Boomers who don't know what ad block is can subsidize everything. They already own 50% of all the wealth.

I know this was tongue-in-cheek, but I see it as a time investment — or an opportunity cost. If you’ve got gobs of money and just want content now, maybe it’s not worth your time to stay on top of all this subversion technology.

Exactly, just like I expect to get paid for my work. I want a simple way to pay for all the pay walls in aggregate so I'm not signing up for 27 different subscriptions and I read one article from each source. I'm not against paying, I'm against a huge pile of bullshit management.

How do you feel about Apple news, or similar aggregators?

I haven't used it, but it looks ok. It doesn't fit my usage patterns though.

Those hit the same issue, given they are just linking to various sources, each with a paywall.

At least Google News and Artifact lets you block sources and with Artifact it understands paywalls, so stops recommending you posts after a while.

The one thing both of them are missing is the ability add a new source. E.g. if I stumble upon an interesting blog post or newsletter, let me add that blog to the mix, but use the same algorithm to incorporate the post intelligently into the algo feed.

No no, that's a monopoly (by HN standards). If anything like that were to exist, in 5 years time the comments section would be full of people clamouring for anti-trust action.

A complicating factor: I think the people frustrated with Paywalls are often not browsing the website directly: A friend or relative sends you a link "hey check this out", or someone posts an article on a news aggregator site to spark discussion. You either hold the escape key after a refresh so you can chat with your mom about the article, or cut right to the comments section of the aggregator site and post something insightful based on the title.

The problem is that paying is almost never anonymous, and there are still many places in the world where consuming the wrong text makes you a quasi-criminal.

Most of the internet is duplicative crap, made way more easy to generate via AI now.

One person writes the article and 1000 people copy it.

The only way to solve that would be for Google to be smart enough to only link to original sources and not reposts.

Then at least we are rewarding original thinkers and could concentrate our attention (and money) there.

The internet will also collapse when everything has turned into ad-optimized clickbait.

There is no shortage of brilliant people who are happy to share their creative work for free. Remember blogs and RSS? They were great. Static pages don't cost anything to host either.

I reject your false choice.

Why happened to blogs and RSS?

> Static pages don't cost anything to host either.

Really? Who's hosting static pages for free? Github? Because they certainly still make money, they're just hoping to upsell people. If static sites for Github become a major cost you can bet they'll find a way to subsidize, such as advertising.

The fundamental problem is that you can't unread an article if you don't like it, and get your money back.

You can block the source in many apps so you don’t see it again.

Usually you can't refund your meals in restaurants. Maybe if you insist they will let you, but it's very... Karen.

In a restaurant you have a pretty good idea what you will get, generally.

Also the analogy is flawed because many people will stick to a few different meals they like from a restaurant. This would make no sense at all for information/articles.

The issue is the paywalls preventing access to information. Information should be available to everybody, regardless of whether or not they have the means to pay for it. Imo, it's best to have paid features that are not expected to be provided for free that helps pay for the free features or if going the advertisement route, make advertisements that are non-obtrusive and don't make the user's experience worse.

The internet existed before paywalls or ads.

Maybe not in its current form where faang gets to make billions loads of services are free, but fundamentally it can exist

Of course it can exist. But say goodbye to random blog posts from people who just want to put their voice out there. They'll need to establish a platform first (probably on some other ad-subsidized platform), get people to pay upfront/ subscribe, and then buy hosting.

We wanted music withóut paying for CDs.

Internet content is largely non exclusive and infinitely replicable.

Even the RIAA gave up and embraced the web, if begrudgingly.

Single edition single article news is simply a different type of good/product on the web. When publishers realise this and do what Spotify/QQ have done for pop music, then they'll get the additional revenue they seek.

Those are far from the only options available. Recently platforms such as patreon have shown that it is completely feasible for a small subset of enthusiastic fans to financially support some creator that makes their content freely available to anyone with an internet connection. And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time, so acting like those people don't exist in spades just because a bunch of rent-seeking content farms have entered the field in recent years is ludicrous.

No, those are not the only options. But the money has to come from somewhere.

> And sharing low-to-medium effort content like articles for free purely out of passion without any expectation of financial gain has been a part of internet culture for a long time,

Where? Sites like Wordpress or Medium are ad-driven. Or you have to create your own site, which means paying for hosting.

I have a feeling there's a but of point-missing going on. The authors are not really getting paid for their work; modern copyright is a get-rich-cheme for rights-holding corporations. (I write 13 books and netted a few hundred for it. All the rest was bagged by the publishers.) Resisting paywalls is not resisting the idea that the authors should get something for their work. It's resisting an double exploitation structure, where networks monopolize, enshittify, and bleed dry everyone they can get their hands on - authors, readers, advertisers, subjects, everyone. That this is so is easily shown_ take structures where the actual authors get paidm and people pay voluntarily. Patreon is still a fairly good example for this: people do their work, put it online for free, and people still pay for it (and some bonus content), for the joy of listening to it/watching it/whatever.

How does the tech work? How do they bypass the paywall?

Looks like they use some sort of proxy:

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%...

Typically news sites rate limit how much a particular IP can be used to read articles. I assume the proxy IP is different each time.

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