Getting harder and harder to read articles online (rant)

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League_Girl
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13 Aug 2020, 3:19 pm

I am starting to run into articles I can't even read because you need to pay to subscribe. I use up my free articles and then I can't read anymore and I wish people would just copy and paste articles but that could be a copyright violation. Then the website would get hit with a DMCA for copyright infringement.

I can understand why they would do this though. Once upon a time their websites were being supported by ads, then people started using block ads plugins and they were not making any money so they decided to start charging people to subscribe. I honestly miss the days where you had to turn off your ad block to view the article. I would at least add that site to my whitelist.

No I do not want to pay any money to read stuff. They can't make me. Even if someone does copy and paste articles, I wasn't going to pay for the subscription anyway, I just simply won't read it so they are not losing any money if I do read it for free because I wasn't going to pay for it anyway.

RIP Medium. Now you have to pay $5 a month to subscribe to read everything.

I know it's very little money but it all adds up if you pay little money here and there. Me and my husband spend around $60 in subscriptions for streaming and game rentals and books; Disney Plus, Netflix, Gamefly, and my husband pays for youtube premium and we have Kindle unlimited so I can read all these books for "free" without buying a book to read. So I am already paying.


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DeepHour
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13 Aug 2020, 3:31 pm

Mmmmm.....I held out against subscriptions for years, and have only succumbed once so far - I subscribe to the Daily Telegraph digital edition for £8.60 per month, which allows you to read all the articles and contribute to the comments section.

The Guardian is a left-of-centre British newspaper whose online version I read fairly regularly, and to which I contribute via its comments, and it's still subscription-free, though for how much longer I'm not sure.

I'm basically a bit of an anarchist in this field, hate the whole idea of 'intellectual property', digital rights management and all the rest of it. If I'd been born thirty years later, I'd probably have ended up as a serious hacker and would have ended up being shipped off to the USA for trial at the insistence of the CIA, the FBI or whatever body arranges these things.

I've actually managed to 'crack' a couple of paywall-protected sites in the past (by entirely legal means, LOL), but they soon get their act together and slam the door shut again.


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Oh_no_its_Ferris
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13 Aug 2020, 3:50 pm

If you can't access a news article due to a paywall, insert "outline.com/" before the URL of the news article. It sometimes will bypass the paywall. :D


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DeepHour
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13 Aug 2020, 3:51 pm

Does that work with The Times and The FT?


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Oh_no_its_Ferris
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13 Aug 2020, 3:55 pm

Just tried it on a Times article and no dice , the FT appears free ?

my bad , it looks like neither are supported :(


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League_Girl
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13 Aug 2020, 3:57 pm

Back in the days people subscribed to reading newspapers and buying a whole entire paper, now I guess it's the same as online. I remember when my parents read more than just The Columbian and The Oregonion and they also read Washington Post. But they had to pay money on that too. They also read magazines too. They had to get all their news from different sources. My mom used to say how lot of people don't know how to get facts but maybe they just didn't want to pay money to read different sources?


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Son: Diagnosed w/anxiety and ADHD. Also academic delayed and ASD lv 1.

Daughter: NT, no diagnoses. Possibly OCD. Is very private about herself.