

Ask HN: Do you avoid reading articles on sites with paywalls? - iamjdg

I do.  Especially the New York Times.  They write interesting articles, but I avoid them because they are behind a paywall. I don&#x27;t want to give traffic to web sites with paywalls and encourage it to catch on.
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rayalez
I'm going against the crowd here, but frankly, I wish that more websites could
switch to that model.

I'd rather honestly pay for great content that is worth reading. I think that
ads misalign incentives, and force journalists and writers to focus on writing
clickbaity articles to drive as much traffic as possible. If more people would
agree to pay for content - we would see less bullshit ads and less articles
needlessly separated into 10 stupid parts.

It would provide a legitemate business model for new writers and allow them to
focus on creating high quality content instead of being forced to dumb it down
to the mainstream level to get the views.

Also, if websites like facebook could suggest an alternative payed model
without being hated for it by everybody, they could focus on user experience
and building quality products, instead of tricking people into watching as
much ads as possible and selling their data.

Right now writers and artists can only:

\- Rely on ads for their income

\- Beg for money on patreon

\- Have to sell some t-shirts and dumb merch

to support themselves. The only honest and bullshit-less way to make money is
selling books, but it's not always applicable.

I believe that if you think that the content is worth reading - it is worth
paying for. Do an honest business transaction, and pay money for the value
that you receive, instead of forcing people to come up with shady and
manipulative ways to extract money from your attention.

If more people would agree to pay for content, internet would be a much better
and more awesome place.

~~~
iamjdg
i respect your opinion. i agree it is tough to make a business for writer and
artist these days. same goes for game programmers, wow talk about a march to
the pricing bottom.

but why fight what the market wants with paywalls?

for me it's the "nickel and dime" thing, not just simply paying for quality
product. i can't stand it. i want to pay for everything once, in an indirect
way, that is almost unnoticeable to me.

have you ever driven in switzerland and italy? you enter switzerland and you
pay 40 euros to use their roads and you sort of hate switzerland for it. then
you enter italy and you don't pay anything and then all of the sudden you
start hitting pay gates every so often and you end up paying double what you
did in switzerland.

i fear for where these paywalls will take the internet in the future...i want
something more like driving in switzerland than in italy

~~~
rayalez
Yeah, I completely agree that the current system sucks.

There needs to be some universal way to conveniently pay small sums of money
for viewing an article or watching a video.

It would be awesome if there would be some generally accepted system that
allows you to embed a button on your website and accomplish that in one click.

Maybe it even exist, I'm not sure(if it does it's not widely accepted enough),
also maybe there's more elegant and clever way of doing that. But to me it
seems like a great startup idea, if someone could solve this problem a lot of
people would be happy.

~~~
iamjdg
it does sound like a good start up idea. if you can crack the internet rewards
system that satisfies both buyers and seller, you would be really onto
something.

it fits with peter thiels philosophy from zero to one: what is nobody else
doing?" "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

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interesting_att
Of course I avoid these articles.

First, most material behind paywalls aren't that great. The NY Times hardly
has the monopoly on quality reporting. In fact, most money-driven publications
tend to be low quality in many respects, especially when facing people with
power and money, because the paywall isn't their only revenue stream. The
Intercept, which is a non-profit, routinely beats out the NYT on national
security reporting.

Second, these paywalls can be easily bypassed. Again, why pay for this? These
notions that these words are their property and hence need to be paid for it
have no moral weight to me, especially when some of these publications got us
into the Iraq War.

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byoung2
If the article is really interesting, I usually open a private tab and then
Google the title. Clicking from a search result usually gets me in.

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bluejekyll
Paywall, meet back button. The issue is that stuff on the web has basically
always been free (ad supported). Trying to switch to subscription models is
going to be difficult unless every media company decided to switch to that
model, and they were as effective as the MPAA at giving a distribution channel
like netflix.

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lovelearning
Yes, I just close the tab.

It's the user experience that puts me off - dialogs with patronizing sentences
like "it looks like you are someone who enjoys great content", signing up with
a strong password, storing that password in passwordsafe, verifying email,
logging in, selecting a plan, entering credit card details....

Instead, if they just used a prepaid wallet through my gmail sign-in and
silently deducted some amount - say 10 cents for every 5 minutes spent on
their site - without bombarding me with all those irritating dialogs, I
wouldn't mind paying.

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davismwfl
I avoid reading them as well. Generally if you wait just a short time someone
else will cover the same material and publish it on a non-paywall site. When I
see people on HN (or other sites) post a Washington Post or NYT article that I
am interested in and that is behind a paywall I just google the title and
generally some other news source has it covered so I can get the basic
details.

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drallison
I frequently choose not to read things which are behind a paywall. I do
subscribe to the NY Times and make regular use of my access through Stanford
to read technical articles published behind a paywall. Many of the article
that interest me (often linked from HN) end up being clickbait and can be
ignored on the basis of their teaser.

In fact, I treat pages that require registration and/or a question answer
exactly in the same manner as paywalled articles. If the article is
interesting enough, I may give a random answer or create a one-time
registration.

I do not like the proliferation of "free registeration" sites. Over time I
have become more and more irritated but such requests.

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27182818284
No.

I actually pay for the NYTimes. They provide a real value to me, but _not_ in
their webpage

Their value to me comes in their mobile app. I like to read their articles
there, _and_ they make me feel good. For example, they hit your app with "Good
morning, here's what you need to know" followed by a daily briefing. the daily
briefing is worth it alone, but having that extra part, as lame as it sounds,
makes me feel good.

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bowlich
Not online. But I still keep a number of print subscriptions going (Nat Geo,
Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine).

It's rather rare that I find an online article that is well enough researched
and written to warrant paying for it. I suppose if I found more online forums
with long-form articles with on-the-ground research than I would be willing to
pay up but it I haven't really seen anything that quite fits.

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sixQuarks
If you use chrome, you can delete all cookies from past hour. That works
sometimes. If you have a VPN, you can connect with different IPs and get
access to articles that way. (This all assumes the paywalls give a few free
articles each week/month)

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gt565k
Sometimes I can right click -> inspect element, and get rid of the paywall and
see the content

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namplaa
For the paywalls on many articles that I'm interested in I just Google search
them. Many allow you to read the full article if you referrer is google.com

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pvaldes
yes, I do.

