Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I don’t want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article.

They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything.

I highly recommend you give this a shot.

Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the word.

Not sure if you are Dutch, but if you follow dutch news then you'd known the soap bubble 'blendle' has burst already... Afaics they are at the brink of bankruptcy, and needed multiple financial injections to 'survive' and papers like NRC, FTM and recently the telegraaf have already pulled their publications.

Today the people behind blendle launched a new product, Medianieuwsbrief.nl To me another pointer that blendle is no longer viable and they are looking for new products.

They are what others describe causing brand erosion, as they collect articles from lots of sources, readers will forget/not know who actually wrote the article, which newspaper the good articles come from etc.

I am Dutch. Born and raised. I moved out two years ago though so I am not completely up-to-date with all the recent development.

Jeez. I didn't know the situation became that bad. I didn't notice because I mostly read American news. From what I quickly read on for example NRC [0], they pulled their content because Blendle introduced the concept of a subscription and that would cut profits for NRC.

The new concept Medianieuwsbrief.nl looks like a last resort kinda thing. I doubt it would take off.

[0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/03/07/waarom-nrc-stopt-met-bl...

Alexander said to be inspired by https://www.mediagazer.com For their new site.

That new site hurts my eyes :)

Does it work as I suspect: you pay, and yet you still get ads too?

No ads in my experience. You should check out the beta and see what you think, I still think it's running. You receive a few dollars in credit to try out the platform. Personally, I really love it.

Nope, I never saw a single ad. You open up the app, pick and article that looks interesting to you and you can start reading. When you click, you pay a small amount, the price for an article is always clearly displayed.

Oh c'mon. I cannot endorse a cool product? They're from my home country, I like their product and I'd like to see people use these kind of services where authors actually get paid instead of through ads.

Hijacks my back button..big no no

Can someone explain to me why hijacking of the back button is even possible? It's obviously something that browsers could fix, and the fact they don't fix it means that there must be some legitimate uses. But what legit use?

In this case I think it doesn't hijack your back button. The first page redirects to a second page, and they both end up in your history. If they used history.replaceState() then you'd only have one entry in your back-stack. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

In a perfect world, it would be used by single page apps that are driven by JavaScript to provide the same benefits of linking, history navigation, and so on, without having to actually load a new page.

Think an online webmail client, where each time you view an email it adds a new item to your history.

JavaScript apps. If you dynamically load content using js, the user will likely expect the back button to undo that change.

What exactly does it make the back button do that you don't like? It seems to work fine for me.