Bypass Paywalls is a Chrome extension to help bypass paywalls (NYT, WSJ, et all) | Hacker News Reader

Bypass Paywalls is a Chrome extension to help bypass paywalls (NYT, WSJ, et all)

github.com

28 pointszam114 comments

The main sources of financing of the internet are ads then you have adblockers. The only path for traditional media to survive is go digital then you have a bypass. How are they going to have any chance?

Life is unfair isn't it? I just drank non fair trade coffee and I feel fine.

Happiness requires confidence - Seneca

Stealing is more than just "unfair".

Blocking ads is not "stealing", similar to how changing/muting a radio station or TV channel to avoid ads is not "stealing".

Sending me an ad along with my article and crying when I don't display it to myself doesn't mean I've done anything wrong.

If you want to be in a position where users need to display ads to use your content, then you need to form that legal agreement with your users. You can't not do that and then pretend like I have agreed to view the ads.

Exactly. A lot of us here talk about the increasing tracking and everything being ad financed. But when companies try for alternative sources to fund themselves we have people here complain about paywall.

I'm not going to personally install this and I'd pay publishers for their content. What I won't do is sign up for an expensive yearly subscription that is generally made difficult to cancel just so I can read a handful of articles a year.

Newspapers really need to offer a payment option that allows me to purchase access to a given amount of individual articles or purchase access to the entire site for a given published date just as if I'd paid for a printed copy and that access needs to be permanent.

You expose valid concerns and go beyond proposing possible solutions. There is probably a more complicated issue here, about difference between media agencies, and authors as content creators. At least, what you do is the positive and creative way to approach the problem. Probably a browser extension is not going to ruin the industry but is perpetuating that wrong mindset about how everything in internet must be free. A publishing model close to the vision you refer is the magazine subscription. Once we talk about the newspapers model, solutions turn into a challenge.

This is simply not my problem. When companies can exploit people, people should be able to exploit them back.

A. I don't care

B. I pay for things that are actually good. With news it's mostly network effects, which is worth circumventing but not worth losing money over.

Imho its extensions like this that make Firefox mobile a joy to use, even though it's noticeably slower overall. The title says "Chrome Extension" but you have to jump through hoops if you want to use it on desktop chrome, and it's not supported on mobile chrome.

What's annoying about this kind of plugin, is that it forces sites to fix their easy-to-bypass paywalls, and then _I_ won't be able to bypass them anymore (display: none; anyone?)

The problem is intrusive ads even after I pay for the service. An ad in a newspaper doesn't track me when I am done.

That ads are the only way to make money is a bullshit excuse.

Same for paywalls. As far as paywalls go, there can be easier subscribe and cancel models, like 10 articles a month, but a 5 articles as top up, etc. Don't make it so hard to cancel.

The problem is that the news companies don't want to catch up to the internet and keep complaining with BS excuses

I don’t like paywalls but I have learned to live with simply not reading certain articles.

I have a subscription to the Washington Post, and can access content from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, the New Yorker, etc. through the public library I work at.

If you’re in the U.S. you should consider checking out your local library. There’s a good change you have access to some of the above already and don’t know it.

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