Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package | Hacker News Reader

Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

linuximpact.com

136 pointsdddavid55 comments

It says "Why do paywalls exist", of course to elicit payment for content, that's obvious. But what is less obvious is that they exist because we're centralizing a lot of information in a few places, and these sites require a lot of funding to operate.

In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. I know it sounds like a massive simplification, and I don't claim to have the details on how to improve the situation, but I think we need more decentralized content creation.

Often when I hit a paywall i will simply Google the topic and sure enough there is an independent blog with the same story. That blog costs a fraction to run compared to the big news site I first landed on.

Let's spread the information out more.

Quality reporting isn't free (I know, I sound like a paywall myself, but it's true). It involves people traveling to warzones or disaster zones to get a view on the ground, or spending weeks chasing down and investigating leads, or getting interviews with important people or leaks from insiders. In a good news organisation, that is what the paywall is paying for (no doubt there are many bad news organisations that try to charge you for low-effort rubbish - nothing new there).

A lot of significant news stories are broken by these reporters. If you get your news from independent blogs then I suspect either:

* they are rehashing the content from the paid journalists (which is fine, but not really a sustainable model if everyone does it)

* the news is not all that thoroughly researched

* the person actually has put a lot of time and effort to deliver you in-depth news for free, in which case, you have to ask yourself why.

To be clear, I use paywalls as well, but it's not as simple as saying the tech is cheaper now so there should be no reason to ever pay for news. If no one in society paid for news we'd all be worse off.

There just needs to be a better way to pay. I’d pay a dollar to read something interesting. I will not give them my CC though and sign up for something that’s a challenge to cancel.

I know this has been said a million times before, but it is what it is. And I do 100% agree with you.

One other thought I’ve had is that the comments on some of these news sites is worth the subscription cost on its own. For example the financial times comment section is top tier.

That's very doubtable. The people who won't pay for a one month subscription won't pay a dollar to read an article either. Then they'll say "Oh, it's such a hassle to provide my payment information for something that is just a dollar".

These paywalled magazines know the customers better than the customers themselves.

The reason I mostly don't subscribe is I follow lots of aggregator links to lots of different publications, and I don't read enough at any one publication to subscribe. Micropayments would solve that for me, if they were reasonable (not a dollar per article) and just a simple button click, and I trusted that the article wasn't clickbait.

Another business model would be some kind of group subscription to all the major papers and magazines. They could keep track of whose articles I read and distribute my payment among themselves.

Instead they're stuck in an ancient business model where you subscribe to a newspaper and a couple magazines and just read those, because it's all printed on paper and distributed in batches.

In the absence of micropayments or group subscriptions, I pay for one major publication, bypass paywalls on the rest, and feel like I've done my bit. If everyone did the same, then with a reasonably random distribution the publications would all be getting paid.

Micropayments don't work business-model wise.

There was a "national model" in Eastern Europe, that offered one subscription to multiple services, but the company evolved to provide individual solutions. While it was good for the consumer, you essentially had competing newspapers under one subscription and if they wanted to raise the price they needed to cooperate. That didn't work out.

Then there was blendle - a service that offered a similar approach, but for micropayments - provide credit card once and pay as you read. They pivoted to subscriptions as the model wasn't working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

> Another business model would be some kind of group subscription to all the major papers and magazines. They could keep track of whose articles I read and distribute my payment among themselves.

I believe this is the future. Not only for traditional newspapers and magazines, but for all written content of quality online. Massive syndicates of blogs and websites under common subscription umbrellas. Like video streaming is today. Let's end this online nightmare of ads, scams, SEO, freeloading and clickbait!

There's PressReader already today, but at $30 per month, it is too pricey for most. Readly is a whole lot cheaper for a smaller catalogue, but suffers from having an extremely bad user experience. I think most people would be interested in mainly news and independent blogs. What sane individual reads stuff like Rolling Stone or Vogue?

> In the absence of micropayments or group subscriptions, I pay for one major publication, bypass paywalls on the rest, and feel like I've done my bit. If everyone did the same, then with a reasonably random distribution the publications would all be getting paid.

Agreed.

PressReader is interesting but doesn't fix my problem: following links from aggregators. Single sign-on to the publication sites would work better.

There's a whole genre of twitter post articles by the NYTimes that fail to credit the original work of the journalists at a local paper or NGO type of media service. So that phenomina can operate in reverse too

> Quality reporting isn't free

Quality reporting isn't common either. I check a few news sites now and again to find out what's going on in the world and the signal to noise ratio is abysmal. It's gotten to the point where, when something really major happens I often find out about it from other people first. Then I might hit the news sites to get more information but that information is usually pretty sparse.

I do agree with your point. We need good journalists, and we need good distribution channels and compensation for those journalists. At the same time, the necessity is becoming a bit more niche thanks to the Internet and social media. For global affairs, journalists are an absolute necessity. For things that happen locally ?

The age of smart phones and social media has created a situation where raw, unedited sources get uploaded in near realtime without click-baity headlines and spin-filled editorializing. Which calls into question of the necessity of mainstream news outlets for these types of stories. Typically you'll get many sources in one feed as well.

I don't have the answer. I don't want "quality journalists" to disappear. I'm also seeing less and less of what I can identify as "quality" journalists. Most seem to be independent and post on Substack or produce documentary films. The paywalled mainstream news outlets look more and more like tabloids each day.

Micropayments would improve the incentives. Click a button, pay a penny, see the article. You'd only be willing to do that if you trust the publication to provide quality articles.

I think the problem comes down to: I have no faith that any for-profit journalism institution presenting a paywall will perform like a good actor in return, because the well of advertisement and content for money has been poisoned for so long by so many bad actors that there can be no trust.

Cable promised that you paid it, so it would never have ads. At the movie theatre, you pay to get in, then pay $25 for sugarwater and corn, then sit through 25 minutes of advertisement.

Does the international-megacorp-owned newspaper that shut down all its local news teams really need my $6/month? Would they do good if I gave it to them? The horse is unfortunately kinda out the barn door here.

Not part of that group are smaller, intentionally local or mission driven, perhaps non-profit organizations, especially if they offer the news for free but then have a premium model that allows me to support them and get a non-essential frill. Those places are at least starting from a place of utility and trust, and I will reward them for it.

How is so much of the content just corporate or police press releases without any further research? How are so many publications willing to provide a pseudo-authorative platform for the worst people on the planet in their op eds?

Without even bringing up that I'd be paying for the privilege of having ads jammed in every three inches of scroll. I'm not paying a damn thing to help them spread bullshit as if it were news.

> How are so many publications willing to provide a pseudo-authorative platform for the worst people on the planet in their op eds?

That's because newspapers should be platforms of free speech. If an editor refuses to take in an op-ed from important people, no mater how horrible, hen he is no fi for he job. If newspaper readers don't want to read the opinion of their enemies, they're just dumb.

They should be platforms of journalism. There are plenty of other venues available for "important people" to share their views. A news outlet lending credibility by uncritically publishing an opinion is not journalism.

A news outlets lends credibility by publishing an op-ed as much as Samsung lends credibility to what you're saying when you're on the phone with somebody. Newspapers have always been and should be part of the public sphere. Their mission should be to investigate, interview, report, publish, and let the reader form her own opinion. Not to shove their own opinions down the reader's throat. A serious newspaper will interview both sides of any conflict, and print their viewpoints uncensored.

Do you want to read the an op-ed written by Putin or Biden in the New York Times or do you want them to write "That horrible man doesn't have opinions that align with ours, so we won't print him so that our readers are protected from him"?

You contradict yourself by saying both the platform should publish important people and that the platform is not lending credibility. Which is it?

Then you created a strawman argument to knock down. If they do anything, I'd actually like them to research the statements made and publish the facts instead of publishing the statements directly under their headline. They don't need to put their heads in the sand.

Maybe spending less time reading biased op-eds would help you develop better skills in this area.

Your insult is the kind of low quality insult that gets published sometimes in smaller local newspapers. It doesn't add anything but at least helps in filling up the pages – or the DOM in our case.

> If they do anything, I'd actually like them to research the statements made and publish the facts instead of publishing the statements directly under their headline.

That's exactly what they almost always do, if such statements are made. But usually there will be an opponent refuting the claims in his own op-ed in tomorrow's newspaper.

>You contradict yourself by saying both the platform should publish important people and that the platform is not lending credibility. Which is it?

Where is the contradiction? If you understand that opinion is different from reporting, then there is no credibility lending or borrowing. Likewise a newspaper doesn't endorse eating at Subway just because they print one of their ads.

I have an idea: how about advertisers pay for ads placed on the websites of news outlets that have quality reporting? And furthermore, how about those ads dont pop up unexpectedly, don't auto play movies, dont have gruesome, edgy, salacious, or insulting graphics or images? Just make an offer and if I'm interested, I'll click.

Any time I hear the debate about paywall vs content provider, they've never disambiguated whether it's greed for more money they are after (by participating in the ads arms-race) or whether they simply cannot be profitable by showing "normal" (aka late 1990's web) ads. I think that's telling.

There are ad networks that serve simple, lightweight ads, and yet when people install an ad blocker their revealed preference equates to refusing all ads, even when they do not have any of the negative characteristics you mention.

I was there in the late 90s to early 2000s, when the ad wars created auto-launching pop-overs and pop-unders. Where closing an ad would spawn 10 more, and where hitting any site on the wrong day could initiate a blizzard of browser windows that would bring even the most powerful PC of the era to its knees such that your only possible solution would be a hard shutdown and restart, your current active and unsaved data in any other program be damned.

Sorry, but that particular well for revenue generation has been permanently poisoned for me. I will never suffer another online ad if I can possibly help it.

It sucks for any legitimate website looking to support its operations, but those horses have long since fled the barn.

A VERY high percentage of ads are obnoxious. And a high enough percentage of ads are outright dangerous. Given that, using an ad blocker to keep yourself safe is a pretty sane choice. Even for sites that _try_ to have safe, sane ads; they're all using an ad network, and _that_ could get compromised, resulting in a dangerous payload (it's certain not an unknown occurrence).

It's very hard to justify showing any ads.

There was a great HN post a few years back about "chum", the taboola-style garbage ads and a breakdown on each one's tactic. For instance, one was talking about why they show close-ups that you can't quite tell what they are, or show a picture of swiss cheese so that the holes trigger our instinct of Trycolophobia (I think thats what it was called). It's not honest communication when they resort to those scummy tactics to steal our attention.

so when grandma's windows box is rooted by a 0-day 'sploit from javascript served by visiting Gardening Today's website (grandma lives in Phoenix, GT is based in (let's say) New Hampshire), she can file a small claims case against Gardening Today to get her computer repaired? $125 initial estimate fee, $200 in "labor" to scan and remove the malware, treble damages, so $1000 sounds about right. I'm sure "quality journalists" would be happy to right these wrongs, wouldn't they?

What about the negative characteristics they didn't yet mention? Do those also track us across all the websites and share all their information with Meta and Google?

I honestly have a really hard time believing that the reason newspapers are so expensive to run these days is due to web hosting costs—I would imagine that most of their budget is spent on staffing (though I couldn't find a budget breakdown with a quick search, so I'm only guessing here).

As a side question: what are you reading about that independent blogs consistently offer the same quality of reporting as major news organizations?

> I honestly have a really hard time believing that the reason newspapers are so expensive to run these days is due to web hosting costs

All those metrics and analytics and anti-adblock services can really add up. The largest assets on an average, e.g., NYTimes article are 2mb+ scripts; not images

> The largest assets on an average, e.g., NYTimes article are 2mb+ scripts; not images

So, in the end, the actual information almost does not exist. /s

It has nothing to do with the cost of hosting or the technology aspect. Making high quality content, and especially journalistic investigation, is a full time job. It takes a lot of time and effort, as well as some money to do it.

That you can find repeats of the information with Google after somebody has made the time and effort to make it means nothing. The information wouldn't exist at all without the initial effort of somebody, and that person needs to get paid.

> Let's spread the information out more.

Okay, then volunteer your time to make important journalistic investigations.

We're talking about journalism, not website hosting. You pay a reporter to find out about a story, the journalist writes up a story and puts it in their company's paper. Some stories are wire stories that everyone is allowed to copy, some stories are not.

You can report on a story that another news outlet covered, but you can't just copy+paste it into your blog, because Laws[1]. Doesn't matter how much money it cost or what your hosting provider is, there are things you can and can't do with "information".

Moreover, depending on a search engine to find you news is a lot like going to a news stand near your house to find news. It's only going to show you the news that has paid enough to get its information out there front and center. SEO today pretty much guarantees that the one with the most money wins.

[1] https://nytlicensing.com/republishing-reprints-and-newspaper...

> In the age of dirt cheap cloud hosting we still depend on these huge sites for our content. [...] but I think we need more decentralized content creation.

We've had that for 20 years in commercial blogs. All they do is rehash the story published by the bigger sites, embed some tweets, and dump a bunch of their own links into their 250 word article.

We always come back to the real news sites because there's a reason the blogs are un-gated.

I can say from personal experience that the extension used to work almost perfectly up until recently. Paywalled sites have started to catch on and are starting to place their articles on entirely different pages than the "preview" page so there's nothing to "bypass".

I have only had incredible success with this extension, but you need to use Firefox. NYTimes articles always work seamlessly for example

It's a great plugin and I use it a lot. But it's very hard to install. Mozilla goes out of their way to keep it out of the store and on Android you can't even sideload it :(

Does anyone know what if anything is substantively different between the original bypass paywalls[1] and bypass paywalls clean? The implication, obviously, is that the original is unclean.

[1]https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

The unclean part is referring to the presence of Google Analytics in the other extension

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/c6...

I changed from that one to the clean one, from memory because it stopped working well.

The clean version seems to be updated constantly.

Besides what the others said, the new clean one supports a whole host of additional websites, is updated more regularly, and generally works better. I think my biggest issue with the clean one is that it's not on any of the add-on/extension stores, and it's unclear why it was removed from the add-on/extension store.

You can use this filter list in uBO as a workaround for the extension being off the add-on/extension store.

    https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt

Comes with the added benefit of working on Firefox for Android until they open up the addons floodgate.

It doesn't work quite as well as the full extension though :(

The main difference AFAIK is that it allows a custom site list, a feature the original version dropped at some point. I do not know why the distinction is clean vs an implied unclean

> I do not know why the distinction is clean vs an implied unclean

The Chrome version of the original extension (other than the Firefox version) embedded Google analytics.

edit: looked it up. Source: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/issues/...

Yeah, bypass paywalls clean both removes google analytics and seems to be updated more regularly (or it was when I switched a while ago, that could be different at this point).

or use same paywalls filter list for adblockers: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...

Finally I'll be able to read posts on HN!

I know it's "against the rules" or "uninteresting" or whatever to comment about this sort of thing on HN posts, but I'm getting real tired of 3/4 of the HN posts being paid bullshit I'm not allowed to read. Even the archived links people post in the comments are inaccessible because CloudFlare.

I fail to see how paid articles adhere to the HN spirit of "interesting discussions" or whatever the exact rule is. These paid articles are more detrimental to "interest" than angry political yelling.

>Even the archived links people post in the comments are inaccessible because CloudFlare.

Actually it's not caused by cloudflare on two counts: cloudflare actually isn't a source of the captcha, the site author copied cloudflare's captcha page; and the site blocks cloudflare dns users because it doesn't send EDNS information.

> cloudflare actually isn't a source of the captcha, the site author copied cloudflare's captcha page

Why hasn't Cloudflare sued for trademark infringement?

If you look carefully it doesn't have cloudflare's logo or claim it's from cloudflare. It just vaguely looks like cloudflare's page that most people assume it's the cloudflare captcha.

> I fail to see how paid articles adhere to the HN spirit of "interesting discussions" or whatever the exact rule is. These paid articles are more detrimental to "interest" than angry political yelling.

For probably 90% of the paywalled articles the discussion is interesting even if you don't read the article. First, the discussions often diverge from what is covered in the article. Second, even the parts of the discussion that haven't diverged often include enough context to figure out broadly what the article was saying.

I'm so tired of reading this over and over again.

Do you need/use cloudflare for anything else besides their DNS? If not you can simply switch to https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/

Many times, some helpful person posts a comment with a link to the same article, sans paywall, on archive.org.

And if they do not, use this bookmarklet

   javascript:void(open('https://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location)))

The archive.today method has always worked best for me. I made a Firefox Add-On to do it automatically for sites I encounter regularly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/surmount/

Use Quad9 DNS

> paid bullshit

Why do you want to read bullshit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com