Countercounterpoint - Maybe I have news subscriptions for periodicals I regularly read, but don't feel like paying for a monthly subscription to read one random article from some news outlet I don't regularly read that someone linked on social media or HN.

So back out of the webpage and don't read it. That is a constructive way of letting a content producer know their user experience is not worth the "expense" of consuming their product. But if the content is worth your time and energy to consume, pay the "price" of admission.

I back out of the webpage and go to 12ft.io, which allows me to both, read the article, while simultaneously using that constructive way of letting the publisher know that their product is not worth it's price.

And then 12ft-dot-io throws an error, but still shows its own ad in the bottom right corner! But you probably knew that since you constructively use them.

The three articles I read from the NYT a year are not worth the price of a monthly subscription.

My choices are:

1) Use archive.ph to read the three articles.

2) Never read a NYT article again.

3) Pay for a subscription for the NYT.

I think you need to be approaching this from an exceptionally legalistic perspective to think that anything but Option 1 is reasonable. If I could pay the five cents of value those three articles are worth, I would, but I can't so I won't.

Standing at an empty intersection, I'm not going to start lecturing someone for looking both ways and crossing the street when the traffic light signals "Don't Walk".

I understand that you might feel that journalism is under funded and that this scofflaw, naredowell attitude is further jeopardizing it. The fact that the reasons newspapers are failing is complex and has less to do with consumer behaviour than it does with other factors not least of which are market consolidation and lax antitrust laws. I pay hundreds of dollars a year on newspaper subscriptions and I refuse to believe that I'm the reason any of that is happening.

I guess we are going down a rabbit hole that 12ft-dot-io doesn't specifically address — it doesn't bypass paywalls. Regardless, #2 is an option. And the choice is entirely yours.

I get more peeved at the entitlement many feel to use ad blockers and rail against content producers monetizing their sites, when the choice to not consume the content is an option. Ask my why I gave up twitter a few weeks ago :)

> 12ft-dot-io doesn't specifically address — it doesn't bypass paywalls.

13ft does, I just tested it on https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/us/politics/hillary-clint...

> Regardless, #2 is an option. And the choice is entirely yours.

I can also choose not to read over the shoulder of someone reading an article on the train or averting my eyes at the headlines displayed at a newsstand. Somehow, I can't find in me the slavish devotion to the media industry margins required to do so.

> I get more peeved at the entitlement many feel to use ad blockers and rail against content producers monetizing their sites, when the choice to not consume the content is an option.

This is such a confusing opinion, and an even more baffling to thrust it unto others.

The best thing to do for ones computer safety is to run an ad blocker, as acknowledged by even the FBI[0]. Profiling by ad companies makes our world more insecure and inequitable. I deeply despite selling client data as a business model, as it seems you might as well.

So, your position is that I should both lodge my complaint against their unfair dealings by not consuming their website, but that it is also unjust for me to evade tracking and block ads because it hurts their bottom-line which is unethical to begin with . This sorta feels like chastising me for walking out of the room while TV ads run and deigning to watch the rest of the programme.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/fbi-ad-blocker/

It’s baffling to me why you would insist on consuming content produced by such dangerous abusers of your security and privacy. And then thrusting your opinion that all content should be free onto all sites monetized by ads is further confusing.

> It’s baffling to me why you would insist on consuming content produced by such dangerous abusers of your security and privacy.

Because I'm not an ascetic monk.

> And then thrusting your opinion that all content should be free onto all sites monetized by ads is further confusing.

I'm not telling you to install an ad blocker. I'm just telling you I am.

> Because I'm not an ascetic monk.

That’s glib. It is possible to discern websites that are safe, respect privacy and are generally pleasing to visit without an ad blocker. If you deem them unsafe, leave, don’t log entirely off the internet.

I’m not saying you are telling me to. I’m pointing out that you are depriving sites from their chosen method of monetization while continuing to consume their content. Effectively “averting your eyes” from their ads, instead of just not visiting the site.

I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just simply what you are doing. It’s the mental gymnastics these threads are always full of justifying the wholesale disavowal of all ad-supported content that is hard to follow.

This assumes the their presence has no affect on me. It takes time to click a page and let it load, and more time to dig through all of the results when all of them are unreadable. Maybe if there were a tag like [ungodlyamountofads] on each, it would help. But even then I'd still have to scroll through them.

I guess I fail to see how one can entirely remove how fully voluntary the visiting of a webpage is. It is how the web works! And how all kinds of "free" media has worked for eons.

I don't mean to excuse incredibly poor user experience design, and certainly not abusive tactics. But sorry if I have zero empathy for your clicking, loading and scrolling pain. Leave the website! It is amazing how many people are defending a site that claims to "Remove popups, banners, and ads" while: 1 - failing to even work. and: 2 - shows it's an ad on the resulting page!

>But sorry if I have zero empathy for your clicking, loading and scrolling pain.

Ok, so we just fundamentally disagree.

No doubt.

While we likely agree there are egregious abusers of both user experience and privacy, I don't believe I have a fundamental right to define how a website is allowed to present their content and/or monetize it. But I do retain the right, which I frequently practice, to leave a webpage and utilize alternate sources in that moment and in the future.

Majority of the internet is your "leave the webpage" example so by allowing shady ad tech sites to use these tactics you're just promoting the proliferation of a shittier internet. Being subjective in this case makes no sense to me unless you have skin in the game so I'll assume you do.

As an exaggerated albeit relevant comparison; this is like saying you don't want police even though there are lots of criminals, you can always just walk away if things look suspicious. This assumes you have the eye to determine what is suspicious. I was hoping I wouldn't have to worry about crime in the first place.

Absolutely I have skin in the game. Do you never benefit from free content, tools or services that exist only because the opportunity to monetize through advertising is possible?

I display a single banner ad on a website that offers a free business tool, as an example.

I also do the same on a free business tool where I also offer a paid, advanced, ad-free version. If a user sticks around for 30 seconds, which most do (average time on both ad-supported sites is more than six minutes), then the freemium site pops up a message alerting them to the paid option.

No obligations and no restrictions on the free versions.

I don't make significant amounts from ads or subscriptions, but I would have no incentive beyond this to continue to offer these services, which many appear to find valuable and use for commercial purposes.

I frequent many free sites/tools that benefit from my visit, and I benefit from their offering for both business and personal reasons. I understand and agree to the transaction occurring.

Outlandish comparisons like you offer completely miss the mark and dilute the legitimate arguments for the use of ad-blockers, which I do believe exist. But I will offer an equally outlandish counterpoint: You prefer a world where over-policing would occur and round up innocent victims with criminals? "Most crimes are committed by males aged 18-25, if we round them all up, we will drastically reduce crime!" Hyperbole, I know. But probably more applicable than your argument for the use of ad blockers.

As I said before, I am not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. Using an adblocker allows for a cleaner, safer internet for the user. No doubt about that. It also, it has to be acknowledged, sweeps the good under the rug with the bad. Period. All-or-nothing enforcement is your proposition. Again, that simply has to be acknowledged. There is no debate there. If you believe that will ultimately lead to a better internet, then that is where we can disagree, as that is entirely subjective.

Marco said said it better than me: https://marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good

I knew you served ads :)

I'm not saying you're hiding anything it's just easy to see why you have this opinion. My example was not outlandish and is relevant. Vs the argument you made which was a purposefully dishonest analogy.

My hope is not to state that ads are evil as I don't believe that, just to point out that you are a person who serves ads, I also never state any of the opinions or beliefs you say I did, Have a nice day!

Did you think I would deny or hide that?

Are all ads, and are all sites that serve ads evil?

I know you visit sites that serve ads. And you may even block them, Gasp!

> But if the content is worth your time and energy to consume, pay the "price" of admission.

This assumes that the "time and energy to consume" is equivalent to the "price". What if it is worth the time to install 12ft or whatever, but not worth the price they want to charge?

I mean, sure, if you insist and make site-level negotiations with yourself about the value of the content.

Here’s a simple example for me:

I search Google for how to perform an operation in an Excel spreadsheet. I skip past the obvious ads at the top first. I click on a promising result on a user forum, but first have to click through a popup and then have a banner covering a third of the screen and a small inset screen with a video. That’s too much for me. I stop and go back to Google. I pick another option. And I may remember that forum is not worth the click in the future.

We make decisions like this online and offline every day. The fact is there are many valuable sites and services that are ad supported and done so responsibly. Not all, but many. Ad blockers are a blunt tool. Installing one on grandma’s browser is a constructive use, but not just because “ads are bad.”

^ This describes my experience as well. And there are certain outlets where I'll read an interesting article if someone links it, but don't want to give them money due to my objection with <xyz> editorial practices.

Paying for it doesn’t make the site less miserable to use. One of the stupid things about piracy is that it tends to also be the best available version of the thing. You’re actively worse off having paid for it. (Ads, denial, DRM in general, MBs of irrelevant JS, etc don’t go away with money, but do with piracy)

Case in point: paying for the New York Times doesn’t block ads in their app.

This right here. It would be nice to have some perk like you can read the articles through Gopher.

I agree, but would like for a way to pay for an article, or a single day, week, or month of access. Just like I could buy a single one-off issue of a publication a couple of times before starting a long term relationship with it. Not all publications support this, and some like the NY Times require chatting with a representative to cancel the subscription. I see a lot of talk about physical media around film and music, but not being able to buy single issues of any magazine or newspaper anonymously when the circumstances call for it, is a great loss for public discourse.

I feel like there were companies in the past that did try this, where you would chuck $5 or whatever in an account, and then each page you went to that supported the service would extract a micropayment from the account.

Never took off. Should have done. e.g. in Santa Cruz there is https://lookout.co , which is pretty good, but extremely pricy for what it is. There has to be a way between "pay and get everything", "ignore/go straight to 12ft.io".

100%. And sometimes that form of payment is putting up with ads, etc. I routinely back out of sites that suddenly take over the screen with a popup or take up large chunks with video or animations. Same as opting not to go in a particular store. But I also stick around and occasionally use products advertised to me. Shocking, I know.

I fully agree with the sentiment! I support and do pay for sources I read frequently.

Sadly payment models are incompatible with how most people consume content – which is to read a small number of articles from a large number of sources.

I know of very few sites that let you pay to get zero ads or affiliate links. The ones that let you pay still show you affiliate links.

No. Paywalled content should not be indexed by search engines. The implicit contract I have with the search engine is that it is showing me things that I can see. The publishers and search engines pulled a bait and switch here by whitelisting googlebot. So it's fair game to view the publisher's website with googlebot. That's what the engineers spent their time working on. It would be unfair to let that go to waste.

Yes, this.

It is an affront to the open web to serve one set of content to one person and different content to someone else (unless there is a user experience benefit to the customization I suppose).

I place most of the blame on the publishers for doing the bait and switch, but Google gets some blame too. They used to penalize website that sent googlebot different results (or at the very least they used to say that they penalized that). Now, they seem fine with it.

I dunno, it seems more like there should be a user-configurable setting to hide/show paywalled content.

If you're looking for something, and it's only available behind a paywall (even a paywall you pay for!), how are you going to find it if it's not indexed?

It would cost me about $500/month if I subscribe to every paywall that appears in front of me.

Pay walls don't get folks there, how ever noble the sellers of information they to brand it.

I pay for the sites I visit regularly.

But when somebody shares an article with me and I want to see what I’ve been sent, I’m not going to buy a $15 monthly subscription to some small-town newspaper in Ohio just because they’ve decided to paywall their content in that way.

Is there a way to pay for journalistic content that doesn't involve participating in the extensive tracking that those websites perform on their visitors?

I love to read the news but I don't love that the news reads me.

> Is there a way to pay for journalistic content that doesn't involve participating in the extensive tracking that those websites perform on their visitors?

Well you could buy physical newspapers/magazines. (Or access content via OTA TV / the library.)

I actually loled when I went to CNN with Little Snitch on, there were over one hundred different third-party domains it wanted to connect to

as much as I circumvent paywalls myself, it does feel like overkill to setup software to do it always. Sites spend money to produce quality content.

Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes?

> Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content

Probably so. I think the differentiation is in the scale at which scraping is done for those kinds of systems.

It’s probably about the same. The difference with sites like e.g. Perplexity is that they have a business model which requires “acquiring” said content for free whereas a single person is just a single person.

> Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes?

Here’s a similar comparison: “Is a human recording a movie at the theatre to rewatch at home really better than the one who shares the recording online?”

Seeing as you’re calling it “theft”, presumably what you mean by “better” is “causes less harm / loss of revenue to the work’s author / publisher”.

I’d say the answer is pretty clear. How many people go through the trouble of bypassing paywalls VS how many use LLMs?

Saying “a neural network scraping content for its own purposes” doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. Setting aside the neural network is unlikely to be doing the scraping (but being trained on it), it’s not “for its own purpose”, it didn’t choose to willy nilly scrape the internet, it was ordered to by a human (typically) intending to profit from it.

The neural network is not scraping content for its own purposes, it is for the purpose of the people who are running/training it.

And yes, one person reading a piece of content without paying money for it is far, far better than one person/corporation scraping all of the world's content in order to profit off of it.

I wasn't even thinking about paywalls, the first thing I did was check to see if cookie banners and "Sign in with Google" popups went away. There's so many user-unfriendly things that you constantly deal with, any amount of browsing is just a bad experience without putting up defenses like this.

why pay a monthly subscription if we're going to be bombarded by legally required popups and other internal promotional stuff that hooks you to the site anyway?

I will never willingly give a journalist my money.

I'm curious why. IMHO, they are true heroes.

Any journalist, or just specific journalists?

Sure, the journalism industry is progressively being replaced by paid activists, but not all journalists are like this.

The Venn diagram of people who truly can't afford a New York times subscription, and even know what Docker is looks like two circles.

Countries outside of the US exist, some of them with extremely low incomes that nevertheless hold segments of the population that are technically competent enough to not only understand what Docker is, but to use it on a regular basis.

The NYT is from the US so framing the question this way is not surprising and drawing the comparison of someone who can't afford NYT but knows what docker is, is interesting without your addition.

There are other things we could mention like, maybe there are many people who can afford NYT but still don't want to pay for it, but that's not what we were talking about. That being said, thanks for the reminder about other countries... I'm sure everyone on HN forgot about globes.

You're also not entitled to free content.

If this was a project to let you watch Netflix or ESPN without a subscription the discord around it would be much different.

Is journalism really less valuable than Stranger Things.

I myself don't wish or want free content, I can create my own entertainment without the need of a large media corporation or a keyboard warrior spoon feeding me.

I don't think comparing Journalism to Netflix or ESPN is relevant since they provide quality entertainment (at least in the minds of their base) vs Journalists who stretch out 2 bits of searchable information into a 10 page ad puzzle full of psychological poking.

Yes, most journalism is less valuable than the critically acclaimed fantasy horror Stranger Things. This doesn't mean Journalism is less important or that good journalism doesn't exist. Honestly it's crazy to me Journalism doesn't see more critique. Most just sensationalize, fearmonger, and point fingers.

If you disagree on the value of a product you simply don't need to consume it.

NYT still has some quality journalism. It's not like that Huffington Post or something

It's not unusual for Americans to live insular lives where the rest of the world doesn't exist in their worldview. The globe snark is unnecessary and frankly not worthy of a HN comment.

And assuming that no one outside of the US could possibly be interested in US-oriented articles in the NYT - not to mention their world news - is just another example of the insular attitude I'm referring to.

I'll do that as soon as one-click-to-cancel becomes law. I refuse to subject myself to predatory business practices so they won't see my money until a legislative body starts working on behalf of the people.

As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page.

Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.

Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.

Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.

Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.

Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354>

My alternative suggestion is global access to content through a universal content syndication tax, or fee assessed through ISPs, on a progressive basis. See:

"Why won't (some) people pay for the news?" (2022)

<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...>

Discussed 4 days ago on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571>

Counterpoint, meet me where I want to spend my money and I will. Not giving every publisher on the planet a sub.