I will leave you with this: How to Bypass a Paywall
Consider that me acting as your Grizz and Dot Com bringing you your Sean Johns.
Nobody wants to read articles, they just want to read headlines and react.
You could post an archive.is version of whatever you wanted to discuss and 85% of the comments will still not have actually read the article. It has nothing to do with availability of information and more to do with the laziness of internet users in general.
If this was completely true then people wouldn’t be complaining about paywalls
It’s more to do with efficiency and one-to-many relationships. If op posts an archive link, only one person (op) has to lookup the link. Everyone else benefits.
Otherwise hundreds or thousands of readers have to individually look up the non paywalled link, or more likely, just skip the article altogether. So if you want to nudge people to read the article, why not just take a brief moment to reduce the effort required, and the article more accessible?
It’s hardly a big ask, and I really don’t see any good reason for the pushback. Ops time is so valuable they can’t spare 30 seconds to get an archive link, but they expect the readers to each take that time?
Before paywalls became ubiquitous, there were less people commenting on only the headline. It’s not the only reason, but it’s pretty obvious why it would promote that kind of behavior.
Nobody wants to read articles, they just want to read headlines and react.
EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT! LITTLE BOY YELLING HEADLINES ON THE CITY STREETS INFURIATES CITY!!!
I’m staunchly against posting archive links directly. The canonical URL next to the headline at least lets you know where it came from. Archive links obfuscate the source and let a trash tabloid headline carry the same weight as one from a reputable source.
That’s especially important since, as you said, people just want to read the headline and react.
That’s also fair, because I think Lemmy has a massive sourcing problem in general.
People straight up post propaganda. I get that every news source is biased but when the url is like therealtruth.xyz, it starts to get increasingly suspect.
Getting around paywalls is all well and good, but the trick to making them go away is for everyone to ignore them - and, by necessary extension, the content they protect - completely and entirely.
Wouldn’t that also make good journalism go too?
Yes but everyone should log off the internet completely, forever.
It would displace a lot of it, yeah. That’s kind of the price we have to pay with capitalism being as rampant as it is now. There are supposed to be 2 sources of limitation on it - the government making laws and restrictions to prevent over-the-top business practices, and the people looking into the businesses they interact with to ensure they agree with its quality and profit strategies. It’s expected that people will go without things they want, need, and/or deserve in order to ensure improper business conduct receives low enough profits to dissuade businesses from going that route.
We’ve been slacking as both a government and a populace for so long that now nearly all businesses are conducing themselves improperly, and the only real way to start correcting course is to abstain entirely from certain markets until there’s enough of a potential customer pool for a more ethical business to start up and thrive by supplying those people with the products and services they want in the way they want them to be supplied.
Perhaps if you actually want anyone to read your thought provoking article, you should just post a link that’s not paywalled to begin with? That way they can easily pass on this important information easily to others instead of giving them a homework assignment?
How dare writers want to be compensated for their thought provoking articles.
How dare anyone expect that information should be free and publicly available to everyone.
Great ideal, but we live in a capitalistic society. Writer can’t get paid, writer can’t write anymore.
- Not sure which “we” you are talking about, not everyone lives in a capitalist society.
- It’s not like there’s no other option than a paywall. Patronage, donations, and optional subscriptions exist, where you can still access the article even if you can’t afford it (e.g, the Guardian). Paywalls are mean spirited, and futile in any case since they are easily bypassed. If people like an author’s content, they will often pay for it, even if they can get it for free with very little effort.
Lemmy is a great example. It turns out that social media companies don’t have to bombard you with ads to pay for their services after all. Voluntary user donations will cover the server/development costs just fine, once you take away the “for profit” mindset.
“we” being the vast majority of humans.
Well, down with capitolism, I say.
I just want a healthy middle ground where I can support someone’s work through non intrusive ads placed on the page instead of either being blocked off completely by paywalls or trying to read the article only to be interrupted by DO YOU HAVE A PROSTATE? GOOD TAKE PROSANTIS FOR YOUR MASSIVELY ENGORGED FAT FUCKING PROSTATE! MAY CAUSE PERMANENT DEATH AND LACTATION. DO NOT TAKE IF YOU ARE A PREGNANT WOMAN OR DO NOT HAVE A PROSTATE OR LITERALLY ALLERGIC TO IT YOU FUCKING IDIOT taking up the entire screen at multiple points
And that’s a valid thing to want. Different companies are trying out different monetization methods.
See link in post.
“Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life”
I see, so what you’re saying is it’s perfectly acceptable for you to put in zero effort to get a decent link for this VITALY IMPORTANT content you apparently NEED everyone on Lemmy to read, but anyone not willing to take time out of their day to go on a quest to find alternate versions of it is just lazy… Makes perfect sense
Ok, so I :
- Find the article.
- Read it
- Summarize it for the post and break out key points
- Often provide a conversation starter
That’s hardly zero effort. You want me to read it to you, too?
Also, I didn’t call anyone lazy here. So if you read that in what wasn’t there, then that’s on your guilty conscience.
What if I don’t like seafood?
Took me a second to get that. (Sean John Silver)
They do have chicken and hushpuppies 🤷🏼♂️
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But, it wasn’t paywalled? The bardeen.ai link OP posted.
At least for me there just was the annoying cookie content modal and after denying all cookies, the article loaded normally.
Fuck me for actually wanting to read the goddamn article I guess?
The main issue for me is I have no problem bypassing paywalls if I’m at my desk at my personal computer in my house. But that’s not when I’m using Lemmy.
I use it from a mobile app when I’m taking a shit or a break between sets or laps or from my work computer during down time.
These are moments when I don’t want to be fucking about with hacks and browser plugins (or literally can’t because they are blocked or don’t work from within the app or my phones os)
I think in modern days the overwhelming majority of people are not using a pc browser to access content. You can post instructions until you are blue in the face but it’s not actually helpful. For all the effort you put in here you could have copied and pasted the article into pastebin and actually be providing value to other users
Sounds like an “app” problem to me.
Maybe I can prod some other Lemmy app developers to “steal” this feature from me:
One way, that almost always works for me, is android’s reading mode.
I mapped it to the “2 finger swipe from the bottom” shortcut in accessibility.
I have to quickly swipe, right when the page opens, preferably before finishing loading.
And voila
This was a walled article on NYT. It even becomes nicer to read.
Doesn’t always work, but the fails are really rare.
Yeah, reader mode is fantastic when it works (doesn’t always for me). In other cases, I just use uBlock Origin to disable javascript which seems to work most of the time.
Thanks for the tip, i never actively tried to bypass ( other than reader mode ), i might give this a try
