We need to keep making more of these.
I would prefer more of these.
Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
The future is going to be some kind of bland corporate internet of useless corporate things (only people with a team of lawyers can afford to operate any service on this dark-forest light-network), paired with some kind of dark web full of very useful uncorporate things, which corporations are constantly trying to hunt down, which everyone will use every day.
The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
People who can afford to & are willing to pay for something like this; tend to also be the type of people advertisers want to actually target: disposable income, willing to spend etc.
Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).
Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.
It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
As a child of the 80s/90s I absolutely love how both of my generation’s uses of “radical” fit perfectly in this sentence. Well chosen.
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
Then, this amount got distributed between the sites you visited. If you only visited one site, they would get everything. 2 different websites = 50% each. And so on. This way there were no surprises in your monthly spending. I still see this as a pretty ideal model.
Micro payments for journalism don't work
And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.
Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.
I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
Not even the publishers! But they sure feel entitled.
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.
ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.
People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.
I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.
But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.
You think, I know, i'll use ads!
Now you have two problems.
Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall.
I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.
After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.
I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair.
Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism.
Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever.
Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else.
Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.
I think the major issue is two-fold:
1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.
2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.
To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.
The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
And there are a bunch of fixed costs that emerge in running payment networks at scale (mostly related to fraud and disputes), so micropayments are a hard sell.
Possible that someone could try again with stablecoins but I'm still sceptical it would work. Like, I'd pay for it but I already pay for a bunch of newspapers monthly.
There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost.
No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices.
No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
The assumption that publishers wouldn't double, or triple dip is absurd. If you've read any recent magazine you'll notice half of it is advertisement. You'd essentially end up with a paid web _and_ ads.
I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
I assume you mean micro payments?
Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
I wonder if they've ever attempted to calculate the cost of being incredibly unpleasant as a service.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
"Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067
Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
Great work.
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap.
These media companies are parasites.
[1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
[2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
"Error Manifest file is missing or unreadable Could not load manifest."
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
That's over 30 articles per day, again at a 5x rate than advertising will return. Will there users that read vastly more than that? Sure. But there's also many readers that will under-utilize the service too.
Just take a look at how YouTube Premium is doing, many creators report that their premium revenue vastly outpaces ad-supported viewers on a per-view basis.
If the revenue doesn't make sense, then you could supplement the revenue with ads for users who exceed a soft cap, or have tiered subscriptions. Something like a basic (1k articles per month)ad-supported subscription for $4, basic ad-free for $6, and unlimited ad-free for $10.
For news? Two, I guess.
My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.
Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.
I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue.
Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...
Bringing up morality or whatever is a complete non sequitur.
Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
