Well.. Let's play devil's advocate and see how far we can go. You're asking a question that could be deconstructed into a few different challenges:
* psychology and ways to subvert (or bias) human observation
* ways to avoid automatic surveillance (read: CCTV, facial recognition, etc.)
* logistics
* hitting large, faceless corporations where it hurts: on the bottom line
Subverting or cheating human observation skills: stage magicians.
Avoiding automatic surveillance: very much in tune with HN. Hacker culture at its core.
Logistics: again, in tune with HN. (Flexport, anyone?)
Hitting faceless corporations in their bottom line?
And underneath that all, there is the common curiosity. This is a technical challenge. How do I win?
Couldn’t your own comment also be deconstructed? Every valid irony or hypocrisy has an underlying mechanism by which it operates yet implies something no less ironic or hypocritical?
I might be misrepresenting the claim, which is for offering distribution via torrent, but that is equally nonsense, as a sharing ratio below 1.0 actually impedes the system.
I will not start a subscription on a random site because it was linked on HN. I'm most certainly not even part of their target group. And even if I was, reading 1 article a month on 100 different sites is equally insane. (that said, I don't bypass the paywall, I just don't read it)
Personally I'm also not fond of the idea to pay money so that they can track me better, but I know I'm in minority there.
We need better ways to pay for content. Preferably one which rewards good content. Today everything is clickbait and the idea to pay for clickbait is extremely off putting to me.
Look how much of the conversation is driven by traditional media outlets. If people really believe we can lose all that and still have a functioning civil society with an informed citizenry, I fear for the future.
Because with everything clickbait there is no reason to focus on content since articles without it "sell" just as well. And since good content doesn't bring money anymore why bother?
As a user it becomes much harder to find good content, which reduces the usefulness and desire to read and continue the subscription.
But with the internet everything is the front page, and stories only get promoted based on how clickbaity they are. I can look past the top headline, this is several orders of magnitude worse.
Paywalls made this much worse, now every single link has to sell you a subscription. Which is bad enough if you don't pay for a subscription but absolutely devastating if you actually paid for content that only serves as bait for people that don't.
That's garbage. The NYT isn't clickbait. Neither is WaPo, BBC, NPR, Reuters, AFP and many others. If you want more tech focused content there is The Information, Stratechery, Pando Daily.
For nearly all of those there is an easy way to pay, or someone else is paying on your behalf.
This breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Could you please (re-)read and follow them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Your comment would be fine without that bit.
Lol. And you post this on Hacker News where every paywall article has some variation of “how can I get around the paywall?”
We have a significant number of people on here that think it’s perfectly ok to steal movies, music, books, bypass paywalls yet, somehow lament the loss of “good journalism” while complaining about being tracked, i.e. “being the product,” all while devising ways to steal content, use stuff for “free” or otherwise do everything possible to avoid giving a single cent to a content creator.
The HN community is just a tiny slice of humanity, but damnit, you/we are supposed to be the vanguard, yet we actually allow “how do I bypass the paywall” to be allowed. Now imagine the rest of the world bypassing the paywalls. And here we are.
If we had comments asking people “how can I more easily shoplift video game consoles?” — would we allow that?
/rant