this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
24 points (81.6% liked)

Asklemmy

44978 readers
1087 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
24
Why hard paywalls is not blocked on Lemmy? (ponder.cat)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I started to notice some people posting NYT, Bloomberg or other websites with hard paywalls, that leads to people in the comments that are unable to read the article to discuess the headline without any analysis and some times spreading misinformation, which cannot be countered by the article, due to the paywall.

Which bring me to this: Why does no one thought about blocking hard paywalled articles for the sake of quality of discussion?

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago

Some of us subscribe to some of them, sometimes they're gift links, other times we can use archive.is or the Wayback machine to get access. Bonus points when these mirror links are in the post body.

It's important to link the canonical source though.

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Because like it or not, actually paying for stuff is the only way to save journalism and by extension our democracies.

The alternative is to link shitty clickbait / AI spam. At least this way:

  1. People might be encouraged to pay for journalism.
  2. There are many ways to bypass the paywall for those who won't or can't pay.

Please don't ban paywalls.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Because like it or not, actually paying for stuff is the only way to save journalism and by extension our democracies.

Paying for things does not prevent enshitification.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 20 hours ago

But not paying for it almost guarantees it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 19 hours ago

I disagree. The alternative to news is no news. If you don't have anything interesting to share, just don't post it.

If you want to share news articles, just use a link to the internet archive, if available, or copy-paste the text if it's behind a paywall.

Information should be open to all on a platform like Lemmy imo. If you're willing to pay for news, you won't need this platform for that.

Please ban paywalls.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No because archive.today exists

[โ€“] [email protected] -5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

How accessible is this to smart phone users?

While it's kind of easy to bypass paywalls on desktop, it's hard to do it on smart phones.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Just tested it now, extremely accessible.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

There are extensions on Firefox for Android that do this for you. I think it's very accessible.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Type your favorite archive site mirror into the address bar (I'm partial to archive.is) then add a forward slash and then the full URL. I do this on my phone all the time.

You'll also often find someone posts an archive link on any articles with a hard pay wall - if you see such a link give them some internet points so they feel warm and fuzzy.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago

https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

However, I would suggest that if you do decide to use this that you pick one or two of your favorite periodicals and either donate or subscribe to them. The Guardian and your local paper might be two good choices.

Also, if you have uBlock, turning off javascript can sometimes defeat a paywall.