YSK: There’s a website available for free that will instantly get you into paywalled sites. No browser extensions needed.
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r/YouShouldKnowu/diverareyouok (30601)

I hate paywalls, so I searched high and low until I found a website that instantly gets around a lot of them: 12 foot ladder.

So far, it’s worked on every website I’ve tried it with. All you have to do is go to the website, then put in the URL, and it opens it for you. It’s a lot more convenient than downloading browser add-ons or extensions.

If you want to test it out, here’s a paywalled recipe from New York Times Cooking.

Why YSK: you won’t have to spend money or switch devices to read paywalled sites anymore, making your life just a little easier.

Edit: u/SaveFroman pointed out another site, PrintFriendly that can do the same thing… meaning that, between the two of these sites, a lot more of the Internet should be accessible.

edit 2: u/userseven says he uses archive.org, which also works by copy/pasting the URL - this works with NYT, etc.

Comments (673)

YSK that a lot of companies pay 12 foot ladder to block you from using it for their website. It's still cool, but less effective every day as more companies pay them to drop their websites from 12 ft's lists.

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None of these work for sites with hard paywalls like The Athletic.

http://archive.is works for literally any paywall

Tried it. Didn't work with Stratfor

Just tried it with an article from The Athletic and it worked flawlessly. Thank you.

The Athletic is notorious for its paywall. And there is good reason behind it. They did not start as just another media/journo house rather like a tech startup that does sport journalis, with serious Silicon Valley VC backing. And they realize, in order to make a profit off paying subscribers, they need an extreme hard paywall.

Except they might be about to be purchased by Fanduel and Draftkings.

Fun while it lasted.

Damn really? I thought the john oliver special was the last I'd hear of draftkings lmao

Yeah they went legit when sportsbooks could open outside of Nevada and now they have more money than god.

Yes this is for just New Jersey last month,

September 2021: In a massive sports betting milestone, New Jersey cracked the $1 billion mark for total monthly betting handle in September 2021. The state collected $82,440,420 in revenue after pulling in $1,011,114,311 in total bets

Because sports betting legislation is BS and they're riding an inevitable wave of inertia.

The athletic is quality jouranlism. You should pay for it

What the equivalent for other types of journalism? I would pay to access a paywall for high quality something... I would even pay for a higher quality Reddit.

It's just hardworking journalists. Unique sports catered journalism. It's amazing and it's my one exception to the attempted paywall bypass

Instead you get to pay for an even lower quality reddit

Thanks for the award kind stranger!

Forreal. They usually run some kinda promo where you can get a yearly subscription for under $50. And for students, it's around $35/year for the first four years. I even came across a promo a few months ago offering a year subscription for $9.99. The app is really clean as well. If anyone reading this loves some good sports journalism, there is tons of great content over on The Athletic that is worth paying for.

Even better, get it from your library’s digital services.

I would love more details about getting this from the library.

Talk to your library, as someone has already pointed out. But for a brief overview of how it works in some libraries (maybe not yours):

https://www.squawkfox.com/zinio/

Talk to your library

Libraries are awesome. Recently found out that our library has digital movie rentals too through Kanopy and Hoopla.

Damn... this might be a legit comment but it seriously sounds like a shill post

You from Rock Hill?

Naw, no shilling intended. It's just a source for some great sports content that is well worth the price (if you're a sports nut, like myself). A buddy put me on them a couple years ago and I probably never would have made the decision to pay for a subscription service like that if it weren't for his vouching, so I'm just trying to give some recognition where its due.

I'm from SC, but not Rock Hill. Why do you ask?

He wants cock

Don't we all

I just had a epic brain fart and thought Gamecocks was RHHS school's mascot

Yeah no insult intended but you provided a lot of $$ details which was kinda funny to me... its good to support great journalism so good work on your part

The Athletic is something that I'll happily pay for because the quality of the writing is just that good.

I follow ND football religiously and I can't tell you how much of a joy it is to read stories that you'd never get in ESPN, Sports Illustrated, etc.

Their podcasts are great, their feature stories are fantastic, and it's worth it for better writing.

I pay $1/month. And it’s way easier now that Apple offers anonymous email addresses with one click.

Wow, nice. How'd ya pull that off exactly?

I’m on the same deal, I believe it was last year this time so expecting it to revert to normal costs this direct debt or next. Hoping they have another special but I’d say it was just to drive subscriptions early doors.

https://theathletic.com/checkout2/intro12monthly/

Ta, but new subscribers only. So I created a new account.

Agreed. I pay for an annual sub. Totally worth it.

Fuck Silicon Valley, they have enough money. Look after yourselves.

Fuck Silicon Valley, they have enough money. Look after yourselves.

Enjoy not having the content, then. People don't do work for your pleasure. They do it for a paycheck.

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Huh, you seem to have slipped past my adblock, thankfully there's reddit enhancement suite!

Goodbye, ad!

As the creator of RES and also a happy paid subscriber to The Athletic, I am... Confused.

Thanks for RES - absolute game changer.

He thinks the other guy is an ad for the Athletic. And proceeded to advertise RES as how he will block this person/ad. I dunno.

As a RES-user I have only one thing to say to you.. Thank you! <3 <3 <3

To clear up your confusion his comment looked like an ad. The ignore feature in RES lets me never see it again! In this instance I lurked his profile and determined he is not a walking ad, but they did get the big red "Advertiser!"-tag!

Ah duh, the tagger.

I am over tired from weeks of poor sleep. Thanks.

Take melatonin and zma my man

I remember RES.

But since I’m a Safari user I haven’t used it in years.

How can you justify newreddit? It's awful. I do love res though, so thanks for that!

Sorry, I forgot the /s, I apologize.

I can't get used to it myself. So I don't justify it. Not sure why I'd have to. I didn't make it! Ha.

Ironically this ended up sounding like an advert for RES.

I can see what you mean, but it's more like a PSA. It's 100% free and lets you filter out everything and anything you don't like, ads disguised as users included:)

Damn can't believe this guy is advertising for RES. I use RES but I'm gonna block you for being an annoying paid shill and definitely not just espousing a service you enjoy

Shills try to sell you stuff. RES is not something that is for sale. You can donate I guess but.. Yeah.. Who the fuck would pay me to shill RES?

I see what you are trying to say, but.. No. Doesn't make any sense.

Pretty sure he’s joking my guy..

Oh absolutely. I still feel theres a need to explain though. Pretending to be stupid for a joke is a dangerous game. A quote coined by Descartes explains better than me:

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

aka some dude on Hacker News in 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082

Yeah, the hacker named Descartes!

Ha! Well it’s worth it for me. Tired of the same stupid hit pieces and all that with the old guard sports reporting trying to stay current and get clicks.

By all means, it's probably great, I'm just so fed up with advertising that anyone who tries to sell me anything gets automatic hate, sorry lol

You sound cranky You should eat a Snickers®️ bar- you're not yourself when you're hangry.

Son of a bitch!

I hear ya. If you don’t want it then you don’t want it.

There's always sales too

~~Just a note - T Mobile subscribers can get a free year of the Athletic~~

Really? How does that work?

Hmm turns out I'm kinda wrong, it's actually 6 months, and that you had to redeem it a couple months ago

Ah well, easy come easy go

Little high, little low

I paid for the athletic for a long time, the 100eenth time I could not link from twitter to my paid app was the moment I stopped paying- just couldn’t take that slight of tech the they never integrated.

I hear from someone their writers every week on KFAN 100.3 in MPLS.

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A lot of sites can be accessed by google bot. And there's ways to make yourself look like google bot

on one hand i dont care for how much data google gathers.

on the other hand the google bot can do some good.

Do you know how to tell which method is used by a website? I've tried to delete the blur element in Chegg, but it didn't seem to be present.

Just tried it with Atheltic and then read this comment. Although I do have a modded apk. That helps

Wouldn't you know, that's the first website I tried lol

As a test, give me a The Athletic page link with a paywall. I will try get around it...

32 teams of comments by 2 people: https://theathletic.com/2965483/2021/11/19/nhl-power-rankings-ducks-climb-while-hurricanes-hold-down-the-top-spot/

I don't see how you're going to get around it though. They don't serve up the whole article then hide it, they only show like 2 paragraphs and hide the actual content from being served behind the paywall. HTML or JS trickery wouldn't help much since the desired content doesn't exist yet.

here you go https://archive.md/JjY6S

I just search for the same URL on archive.md and it usually works.

heres a screenshot of the website. accessed by modified android apk, https://imgur.com/a/keAmMOz

I don't see how anyone can legitimately access this site legally and this mod apk seems the by far the easiest way to access their content for free. this brings a security risk for your device to run malicious content, due to the fact that this apk comes from unknown origins and has only the older version available.

You can download the page which will get you all of the text viewable offline. Breaks some formatting and images but gives you the content.

Did not known that. On iPad, show reader view has always worked for me.

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It gets you like a paragraph more than what's displayed in a browser, but it's by no means the full article. Check out this one which is supposed to be a power ranking of 32 teams and it doesn't even get through the first one completely.

Doesn't work for risk.net either

This only seems to work for text that is above the paywall banner

No need for sites like that, just install this extension and never have to worry about paywalls ever again, https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Or just use uBlock, stops all the ads, naturally blocks most paywalls, and most others you just right click the thing blocking you and delete it the first time you go to a site and you never have to worry about it again.

You can also use uBlock to get around tricky paywalls that this extension doesn't, like the Washington Post and NYT that another commenter mentioned. Just use uBlock to disable JavaScript for the site, and then the rest of the process is the same.

This one has a speed dial image, OP's does not, clearly making this one superior.

I think I'd actually like a browser extension in this case. Would be cool if I ever went to CNN or The Hill to auto load the printfriendly.com version so I'm not assaulted by auto playing videos that aren't even related to the article, and follow me down the page as I scroll.

Firefox has a button that does that for you. I works on some paywalls, as well. Depends on if the article loads before the paywall or after it.

Ah! An alternative to outline.com! I prefer Outline's look, but it's been working on fewer and fewer sites as it got popular, so printfriendly might take up the slack for me.

This is like read mode option in safari. It works in a lot of websites with paywalls

Doing the lord’s work!

doesnt work for the danish news outlet "www.berlinske.dk", or borsen.dk, or jp.dk, or politiken.dk

Ohh that's a nice one

Gonna try this tomorrow, thanks!

The real life pro tip is the friends we made along the way

Awesome find!

Damn, that sounds like virtual racketeering. Pay us and we won't destroy your business (model)

Like Yelp, to name one of many.

It's a weird concept, because it starts as a tool for consumers, but ends as an expense for the companies, where the only winner is the person owning the tool

If you're not paying, then you're the product. It applies to pirates just as much as it does to social media.

They can disguise it as "fighting for freedom of information" all they want, all these sites are just leeching money from already struggling journalists. There's only one scihub.

I wouldn't compare Yelp to a piracy tool. Yelp grew their reputation which pushed peoples to listen to their recommendation. The same way the Michelin stars are highly recognized by some people. Damaging reputation with negative recommendation is a side effect. But it happens with word to mouth the same, although not as fast.

Those piracy tools whole purpose is to force the business to serve clients for free unless they pay. This is the same as protection deals from mafia, they are the ones you need protection from. They cause you a problem to force you to pay.

That's exactly what this sounds like. "Sure would a shame if something were to happen to this nice website you have here."

How much do you know about Yelp and their unethical "business" practices?

I have no doubt that Michelin star aren’t cutthroat and political, but I’d have never imagined comparing Michelin stars to Yelp reviews.

One is appreciative praise and the other has a punitive rating. A curation vs aggregation.

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Literally just a racket

I’ve used Internet Archive for this. But it is a bit annoying.

I have an extension that takes me directly to the archve.org for that page with the click of a button, so that simplifies things

What is this extension

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-page-archive

Thank you!

I haven’t tried this out yet but I just looked it up seems there’s a Chrome extension for this too, in case anyone else wants it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak?hl=en-US

How quickly are articles typically archived by the web crawler?

This site was good about a year ago. Doesn’t work on most sites anymore.

Ihen less people will use it as it gets less useful and some companies will stop to pay them.

Then you make 13 foot ladder and start the process all over again. Unlimited money

Ah, the old protection racket! "You've got a nice website here. Be a shame if something happened to it."

Yeah, I just tried a NYT url & got "12ft has been disabled for this site"

Fuck this sub, it's useless.

It's like all the best reasons to use it have already disabled it. I imagine it used to be a really cool service but has lost its edge. Oh well.

Useless? OP just got a shitload of karma for next to no effort, I don't think the purpose of massive subs like this extends much beyond that lol

I mean... reddit karma is useless.

I don't get any real "rank" here if I blow gallowbo00bz out of the water in karma count, I get no money, no discounts on amazon.com purchases, I can't even point to my karma count & gloat over people because that results in negative karma count because of some strange & unwritten rule.

I don't know: I'm just here for the hobby, game, & city, & porn subs.

For what it's worth, if you get enough reddit karma you can sell your account. It's a metric along with age, badges, etc that makes the account seem more genuine and popular. Which is attractive to companies wanting to subtly promote their products or gain moderator access to subs, etc.

You could try paying for the service which they are providing, you know?

This is a weird comment... we're talking about a service that defies website subscriptions. The fact it works for ANY site is a blessing. It's not like you're getting screwed over by not being able to access NYT paid content for free.

It's also not the sub's fault the site doesn't work for every single subscription.

okay, so what’s the competitor that’s already cropped up as an alternative?

Sounds like 12 ft ladder have successfully executed an extortion racket on a load of big websites.

Shit, that's a great money making scheme. Brb, creating 15ft.io, a taller ladder to achieve the same result. I'll gladly take money from publishers to remove them from the crawler.

That’s hilarious. It’s extortion!

You stole all my happiness away.

Don't shoot the messenger. 12ft stole your happiness away.

What's the source for this?

Source: dude just trust me

Just use internet archive. They aren’t in anyone’s pocket. archive.org

It is very useful but not 100%; you can still petition the Wayback Machine to remove your content. They don't make you pay, you just have to take the time to submit your request. So still possible but more likely you'll be successful because few companies want to do the actual work of submitting a petition.

Yeah, New York Times and Washington Post for two companies that have. It's not a useful site, frankly.

So it’s like paying the mafia not to rob your store

Yeah. The 1st time I had tried to use it, it didn't work because of this!

Apparently the ISS budgets for this kind of thing to keep crew morale up.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F625906%2Fvideo-a-gorilla-chasing-astronauts-around-the-international-space-station%2F

(Proxy site used to remove paywall)

Tried it a few times for Crain's Chicago Business, doesn't work for it.

Looks like they already blocked it for NY times

Oh wow, you’re right. What’s weird is it still works for NYT Cooking, just not the main site. I wonder why that is? I guess my search isn’t over yet.

Your search will never be over. It's a tug of war battle that will never end. Team creates tool to circumvent paywall websites use. Website team figures out how it's doing that and closes that loophole, nullifying the tool. Team finds new exploit to get around paywall. Website team manages to patch that out. Back and forth, to infinity and beyond.

Yes, its frustrating to go look at ONE story and be blocked from ever seeing that story, on a news site that you will never ever subscribe to, because its not a national news site and you are not a local.

That ONE story was written by someone and edited by someone and illustrated or photographed by someone. I’m really confused about why we wouldn’t want to pay them for their work?

Should they be paid for their work? Absolutely. At the same time, if you want to read the paper, you can buy it for a couple of bucks and have the whole paper, every article. That's a fair price. If you want to read one digital article, now you have to sign up for a yearly subscription. Sure, you can have the whole site, but it's 25, 60, or more - even if you want one article. And a lot of them are set up to be easy to sign up, impossible to cancel. What if it's a newspaper you aren't familiar with? Should you pay a year's subscription just to see if you like it? And then be stuck if you don't. (Not to mention as soon as you're in, they mine your data and sell you to advertisers.) And that's just one paper. You better not want to read two or three sources - you might need to moonlight.

Most people just aren't going to do it. Whether it's right or not, the market doesn't support the current paid model. There has to be a better solution, a middle ground option the digital version of buying the daily paper instead of the year subscription. It's fair to ask people to pay for content, but it's also fair to expect a reasonable model that reflects the modern market. Maybe because most papers/magazines are under conglomerates, it could be a multi pass. But it should be something. The alternative is people sneaking around paywalls or journalism orgs going under.

Exactly! I don't mind signing up for a week at premium without being forced to continue. Cancelling is made purposely difficult. I pay for a couple papers but I'm it doesn't make financial sense for me to do an annual commitment to more than that.

I think charging like 50 cents or a dollar to view an article for an hour so is a good middle ground. I get that that would mean less people pay for yearly subscriptions, but, its entirely possible that making that an option means that a ton more people would buy single articles, possibly more than offsetting the loss in yearly subscribers

Yeah, something like that would work, especially for trying out smaller/new publications, maybe with options for micro subscriptions of 5, 10 articles to use as you go, no expiration, no auto renewal. So you could read all in a day, or a month or six, as you like.

My local paper (Indianapolis Star) let's you read five(?) articles for free every month. It's a shitty paper, but it'd be nice if others did the same.

The indy star has done some really good investigations time to time. Miss their old jingle for the classifieds.... Just dial 4 till someone answers. .. What a dumb thing to have nostalgia for

I find that in a proportion of cases, using incognito mode sometimes helps (unless the site requires a signup to get the free articles) as does using uBlock Origin.

Worth a try but ymmv and many sites use quite extreme fingerprinting nowadays to work around this. You could try using a user agent switcher extension to work around that sometimes too.

It's a pain, but so often I need one more article than they offer for free but don't want to pay a 12 month sub for that one extra article. Even more so when it's a local paper on the other side of the planet and I'm just researching a series of article flows that is 3/4/5/6 articles.

Exactly, it's the impossible to cancel issue that gets me ..

I've resorted to using privacy.com so I can make unique cc numbers for each purchase and then close the card and prevent repeated charge requests. I just got another denied request today, from a site that was 4.99$ a month trail one month cancel anytime. I've cancelled they still try and charge every month

I've found that information is sort of like the toothpaste tube analogy, where it's squeezed back and forth until you get what you want/need. Even seeking out a particular article by a particular author can yield results through such sites as university libraries. I've located PDFs, for example, of long out of print, and often obscure, books in such places. In fact, just searching for a title with the phrase "free pdf" attached has located wonderful resources for me. One site, notorious for circumventing paywalls for academic materials is scihub, which I use often as my research would otherwise cost me a small country's GDP.

Sure, I completely agree that the payment model should be better optimised for different types of users. But if you don’t currently want to pay, you shouldn’t currently consume either.

If you want one slice of bread for 0.1 dollars, but the shop only sells an entire loaf for 3 dollars, what’s the right thing to do? Take as much as you want without paying since you feel entitled to it or just not buy the bread?

Me, personally? I skip those sites, look for other news sources that are accessible, and accept ads when they appear on the sites I do consume. I think people will pay for content they believe is fairly priced, in general. But what's fair and how things shake out are totally different - to everyone's detriment. And most people have shown they will find workarounds - ad blockers, sharing passwords, etc - if content makers don't come up with a better solution.

Food isn't a good analogy. If food is out of reach, heads might roll. And perhaps they should.

A lot of times "more accessible" news sources are echo chambers of corporations. If they have enough money to tell you something without charging you, somebody else is paying them to tell you what they want you to think. That's a HUGE problem with modern media. Local, smaller, independent news sources (which used to be the primary sources for the larger guys) are where you get unbiased, thorough information. But they are underfunded and going out of business.

The market does support the current model. It's literally the only model the market supports. Just because it doesn't give you exactly what you want, doesn't make it a bad model.

And to be clear, I used to pay $17 for the Sunday Times delivery (and this was like 15yrs ago, so more than that adjusted for inflation). For that, I got just the Sunday edition of the paper. You can get a NYT subscription for under $10 a month right now. And that's for all the content they produce, not just the Sunday addition. It is cheaper than print media was.

edit: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription

You can pay literally pay $4 for a month subscription to the NYT right now. No commitment, cancel anytime you want.

Ads for free version

Ad-less for paid version.

When it comes to journalism, you would ideally want to keep the reliance on advertisement revenue to a minimum in order to remain objective and without a bias.

A newspaper relying on advertisement income from Nestle will not likely publish an investigative article on Nestle’s exploitation of 3rd world countries etc.

Understood.

Let me setup a pay as you go account, where I get charged 10 cents for accessing the article.

You do realise when you pay to remove a paywall, that money doesn't go to the author, right? You're not paying "them" for their work. You're simply padding the profits a company makes, who probably pays their authors trash.

This obviously isn't every case, I'm sure there's instances where people are also receiving commission, but that probably doesn't happen much. There are also obviously authors that run their own websites etc, but most of these don't stick up a ton of paywalls as they're already making money off ads and whatnot.

You do realise when you pay to remove a paywall, that money doesn't go to the author, right? You're not paying "them" for their work. You're simply padding the profits a company makes, who probably pays their authors trash.

Obviously the money goes to the publisher who then pays their employees’ salaries using that revenue. However, if there’s too little revenue coming in, they either need to pay the employees less or get rid of them altogether. This is how companies function.

Have you considered that maybe this is the reason why they pay the authors trash?

Depends which but using NY Times as an example as that's a popular news company. They reported 8m subscribers, $500m quarterly revenue with a profit of $93m. $2bn revenue and ~$360m profit per year? I don't think they're hurting.

Btw, the whole "maybe this is the reason they pay trash" is bullshit. You only need to take 1 look at /r/antiwork to know this isn't a one-off due to people bypassing pay walls. It's literally how every single company operates, no matter how much profit they're making. If their profit jumped 10x they won't start paying 10x would they? Heck they wouldn't even start paying 2x or 1.5x, at most people would get a small bonus, probably not the writers though.

If their profit jumped 10x they won't start paying 10x would they?

Of course not, because if a company turns more profit then the first people who get a cut are the owners/investors - that’s the reason why they put their money into the company in the first place.

However, if the company starts steadily losing money, then the employees would start suffering soon as the losses would be slowed down with pay cuts and redundancies.

That is not going to happen from simply bypassing a paywall. Also if they did start losing money, their first step would not be to dish out pay cuts and redundancies, it'll be to have more even more aggressive monetisation, probably sell sponsored ad banners and such (if they don't already do this). Trust me, bypassing a paywall is not going to make a news company miraculously go into the red.

Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily agree with bypassing paywalls, but I also don't agree with the aggressive paywalls that try to make you sub just to read a one-off article. I'd rather something else, where I could pay a really small fee to read 1 article or something.

It is kind of insane how people think they are entitled to this stuff.

I tend to think it’s less about wanting everything for free versus the market saying the service is overpriced. For most paywalled sites, I’d gladly pay 10-20 cents per article, which is probably more than they’d get from ad revenue if that were the model. But ask me to subscribe for $10 a month just to read a few articles every now and then? Nope.

Usually I just bounce out of there, though. I agree people should get paid for their work; we just need a better payment model.

I think another part of it is having to go through the effort of putting card info in..I personally don’t care enough to go through all that effort over some article that I randomly found on Reddit, especially considering how many of them have paywalls

Yeah, that’s fair. There’s a trade off between ease of use and people’s willingness to do it, for sure.

There's a hole in the market for these micro transactions. Whoever does it first will make a fortune.

Sure, the entitlement is from people who think that the service is overpriced but instead of choosing not to read the content, people act like they are entitled to get it for free.

Don't get me wrong, I've bypassed paywalls, use adblock etc.

I just don't pretend it's justified, and definitely don't get mad that a company wants to earn money for their products.

Entitled is a funny word. I wonder if some PR guru at some point figured out that was the word to nail into people's heads when they think piracy. I don't feel entitled. I just want it, and I know I can get it. So sometimes, if I care enough and can't afford it otherwise, I go get it. Lol.

Yeah I agree they should earn money for their work. I think what I’m proposing addresses that: providing a way for readers to pay for one article at a time. It may not be as much as the monthly subscriptions that outlets were hoping to make, but it’s more than the $0 they’re getting from those readers today.

I think plenty of people are in that same camp where they know they’re not entitled to it and understand bypassing a paywall is not the right thing to do, but will do it out of a lack of options suitable to their needs. Most people do the right thing when an appropriate option is available, so providing that option is just good business.

There’s some moralizing in other comments ITT that are just silly. It doesn’t matter if it’s called “bypassing” or “piracy” or whether the people who do it are saints or sinners. This is what is happening, and how businesses respond to it has repercussions for their profits and for society at large.

I think many news outlets are just suffering from a lack of imagination by insisting it’s a subscription or the highway. They’re missing out on a chunk of the market and driving the very behavior that hurts their bottom line.

So because the pay model is flawed you are justified in getting it for free.

Damn, you're right. I guess from now on I'll just get my news from Breitbart and FoxNews​.com. They seem to have no trouble offering stuff for free.

Of course not. We are justified in trying to get stuff for free insofar as we are motivated and self-interested individuals, as is true the world over. A flawed pay-model simply increases the number of people who feel motivated and justified to do something marginally unethical.

I'd gladly buy it as a paper, but I won't pay 50€ for a yearly subscription, just so I can use 1 article whoch I won't be able to access in a year.

It's one thing to think you're entitled to stuff. It's another thing to realize there is one and only one way you are realistically going to get access to certain stuff, and to do that when you decide you want it badly enough. With most types of media, like music and video games, I'll grant that all the arguments are mostly self-serving. With journalism, though, it is drilled in to our heads (and for good reason) that it is our responsibility to become informed citizens. However, becoming an informed citizen when you don't have disposable income is can be quite difficult.

Traditional media was struggling long before they started making web content that can be pirated. They continue to struggle, and it's not because of piracy, by and large. IMO the social cost of theft of digital journalism is outweighed by the benefits of people reading serious journalism. If the majority of people who were unwilling to pay were pirating, it might be a more serious issue... but most people just ignore digital journalism that is behind a paywall, and that's why traditional media continue to struggle. It's certainly not because of the tiny minority of individuals who try and figure out ways around paywalls.

You wouldn't steal a news article

And usually it's sourced from somewhere where it's not paywalled. Not always, but check Associated Press ("where the news gets the news") etc.

Because that money doesn't go to the writers, it goes to the corporation that funds the news outlet.

…and what does the news outlet do with that money? Pay their employees.

Even without the paywall, they pay their employees. Your point?

Wait, what is your point?

They need to get the money from somewhere, it doesn’t appear from thin air. If they don’t get it from the readers, they need to get it from companies buying advertising or investors - which could easily jeopardize the objectivity of the outlet.

If they don’t go for any of the options actually bringing in money, they will inevitably close down.

Newspapers have been funded entirely by advertising for ages

The ad revenue for web pages is considerably less than that of traditional print media with the same viewership. Do you think traditional media has been struggling for over a decade simply because they are greedy idiots?

Even if that were true the overhead is substantially smaller

Even if that were true

Do you honestly have any doubts that it is? Please do 3 minutes of research if so.

the overhead is substantially smaller

Naturally. Is it smaller in exactly the same proportion as the reduced revenue? I have no idea, but I doubt it. Also, most traditional media charges for papers/magazines... so at that point your argument falls apart entirely.

Yes I absolutely cannot remotely believe the notion the targeted ads With the higher conversion rates would be less profitable than non-targeted ads

Newspaper ads are targeted... I'd bet they are far cheaper to target than internet ads, since the newspaper can just look at the neighborhoods of their subscribers / purchasers and draw in advertisers based on that alone (without the need for data analytics companies to come in and tell them what their traffic is worth).

The Internet targets ads to the individual reader. Newspaper cannot do that

That's a moot point, see my other reply. Also, newspaper subscribers are as a group a more valuable demographic than randos on the internet, I'm willing to bet.

It’s very much not a moot point

Does that mean you disagree that ad companies like google don't reap most of the added value of targeted ads?

Also, again, demographics.

You can talk about conversion rates, but when we're talking about internet ads its the same ad companies dominating most of the space. That's not to say the ads themselves aren't valuable, but the ad companies (like google) get the lion's share of that added value. Don't like it? Fine, our ads are being served billions of times a day on other sites, you can go suck it NYT. Point being, NYT has FAR more leverage over advertisers in it's local market than it does with ad-serving companies it has to deal with in the online space. Very simple economics dictates that ads in local media are more valuable to NYT, because they can get more of the value of the ad space for themselves.

You do know they have to make money to pay their employees, right?

You're gonna tell me all those ads they've got isn't enough, huh?

Oh, so you willingly turn off your adblock when you visit these sites so they can generate ad revenue?

You think I give a fuck about the NYT?

If it's a small shop? Yes. If it's an online game that's free to play? Yes. If it's a site that offers helpful information (like medical research or articles for example)? Yes. I turn off Adblocker.

But NYT, TWS, LAT, all get adblocked. I owe them nothing.

So people shouldn't pay them because they make enough money from ads.

But block all their ads because you owe them nothing.

Galaxy brain right here.

It really is that simple.

They're not going to be crippled by me not giving them any way to earn money from me, bro.

But you can't complain about them asking for subscription money to pay their people when you don't allow them to generate money from ad revenue.

You surely understand this, right?

Yes I can, news should be free.

Junk articles that are opinion pieces, diet tips, celebrity gossip? Sure. Go for it. That's someone's jam somewhere.

News about a crisis? An important government case? Don't charge for that. That's stupid.

You aren't entitled to somebody else's work for free.

Cool, good to know you equate an entire corporation with indie artists or something.

We're talking about news outlets. You're the one trying to make bullshit comparisons to seem justified.

It would be cool if they did a Spotify type model with news. All articles from different sources in one place and you pay one subscription that gets divvyed up behind the scenes without having to worry about it.

Journalists are generally privileged fuck wits whose laziness and lack of accountability are responsible for the ongoing downfall of rational social dialogue. No, I don't think they should get paid for that.

So why would you consume what they write if you resent them so much?

Honestly try and avoid it these days but when I do it's with the same level of involvement as when I watch an advert for supersoakers. It's something I used to be interested in but I'm not buying it anymore.

If you’re not interested in what they have to offer anyway, then your point is not really relevant to the discussion though? It’s about people who do want to read the articles, but don’t want to pay for it.

Maybe the ones the "write" for Breightbart.... /s

Nah, they're pretty much all fucking twats, doesn't matter what team they support. Lazy, blinkered, stupid, self congratulatory, back slapping fuckwits simultaneously causing and live-tweeting the downfall of civilisation as we know it.

I think context is important , if say it has vital information about a pandemic and things to do about it , it seems a bit sneezy to charge for something like that

But that doesn’t happen, you just made that up. We have a pandemic and there’s plenty of free sources providing vital information about it.

Have you heard of anyone who didn’t know they have to wash hands, wear a mask, vaccinate and stay away from big crowds because they kept getting stuck behind paywalls?

I used it as an example. Not a real scenario. Calm down bro.

I can assure you I’m completely calm and I’d be very interested to hear an actual example supporting your point instead of a fairytale.

I have a foolproof method meanwhile for bypassing a site's paywall.

Paying for it.

I know, crazy thought. And I also am not suggesting you pay for a whole site to read just one article (random ones posted on Reddit or w/e). But maybe if you frequent a site enough, just... pay?

I think, and rightfully so, it comes down to value per dollar. People do not believe the value they get is worth the money they ask. Used to be you would get an entire newspaper that covered dozens of news worthy stories, some braingames, and a few comics, and some ads/coupons all for less than a dollar.

Now, they're asking for over $4. But the value for what you paid for when the price was less than a dollar has gone down. So they're asking you to pay more while providing less.

I don't know a single online newspaper site that charges per article. They go by subscriptions. Usually $4ish... per month.

So by strict "value" logic here, $4 = 30/31 sets of articles (assuming they only post once/day like physical papers, which they don't), compared to let's say $.50 cent papers (so, $15/mo). Sounds pretty high value to me!

But yes they are different mediums entirely, so the comparison to "how traditional newspapers work" doesn't even really gel in the first place. You are absolutely valid saying "I don't think this is worth the price", but I'd be careful trying to make objective "measurements" like this.

My local digital newspaper includes all of that for around $15/month. They have promos though which makes it only a couple bucks each month. $15/month is a little steep for me based on how much I read articles from the site (not a ton) but I'm down to shell out a few bucks for the promos.

YMMV, though.

Paying taxes is patriotic.” He’s married ^^’

Classic arms race scenario.

I mean, the way it "ends" for the user is to pay for the service. Granted, a lot of subscription models suck and most people don't want to shell out $$ for one article... but there is a solution here besides endless tug of war.

Have you tried making yourself a spider?

By this, I mean, paywalls are generally for users. If you download an extension to change your user agent to a webcrawler bot, it usually lets you through because that's the only way sites like Google and the like can index and cache your page for searching.

I usually just paste the website into archive.org so like you said viewing a site scrapped by a spider.

Where on archive.org do you paste the URL? When I paste it into archive's search bar it says "invalid or no response from Elasticsearch". Let's say I'm trying to read this article here. How would I do it?

I find using Firefox Focus can often work if you've used up your monthly allotment of free articles on whatever site. But it doesn't break through paywalls.

Clearing your cookies will reset you free allotment of articles.

Oh, does it? Easier to just fire up a different browser than have to clear cookies every time.

They earmark your IP address so it only works up to a point

That was my understanding.

Yes and no

Paste the paywalled site into archive.org usually works for me.

They are technically separate subscriptions. I'm assuming more people are trying to get around regular NYT but who knows

Best thing I always find is google translate (desktop web browser version) copy a website translate it and click on translated link and it works 90% of the time

Here is a random by Times article I tested it on

https://www-nytimes-com.translate.goog/2021/11/21/world/americas/haiti-missionaries-kidnapping.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=nui

NYT Cooking is a standalone section from the main NYT. It has an independent website and the subscription isn't included in the standard digital NYT subscription.

Wirecutter, New York Times Games and NYT cooking are all separate entities.

I'm a subscriber to NYT and haven't been able to justify adding cooking. Hallelujah!

It could be because New York Times cooking is a subdomain. They might have different authentication methods.

13 foot paywall.

Archive.org usually has archived NYT articles

a library card may help you bypass the paywall

Breaking news, recipies, and BS articles should be free. But I'm very happy to pay NYT for their journalism. It's so in depth and unparalleled

I use AdGuard Content Blocker extension. It blocks the paywall pop-up for many sites. It usually blocks it for NY Times.

NYTimes bypasser. It's a chrome extension and only works on the desktop. Worked as of a week ago when I last tested it. Hopefully still works. Suppose to work with The Washington Post too.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nytimes-bypasser/cmnkbhggfhfejcbmmkelcelmgpjcdkjp

If you don't care about images NYT can be bypassed just by disabling Javascript.

Stop supporting Google folks, other browsers are better.

My local library provides digital access to New York Times and several other newspapers. Support journalism and stop stealing the labor of others.

It's always been this way afaik

Some libraries offer free digital acess to the Times and other papers, check your library website

This is one of those things that, as soon as it becomes known, is no longer a thing anymore.

Reading through how this works, they had to have received a Cease and Desist from NYT or something because it's accessing publicly available cached data that Google has, it doesn't circumnavigate the restrictions put in place by removing them, it just doesn't need to. So I bet they would win in court but that cost is probably not worth it, hence the

12ft has been disabled for this site

Honestly just use Bypass Paywalls Clean, I have used it and the "non-clean" original project for local and US newspapers for years https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/

What the difference with the non-clean version?

"Clean" has telemetry (google analytics) removed and I think it also supports more sites nowadays

It hasn’t taken a shower, duh

You can say whatever the hell you want

How do you use this?

Does this also work for sites that load the full content in the background, but just cover it with a popup/blur? Or is it only for paid subscription login sites?

This site pulls the Google cached copy of the website. Websites typically let the Google spider on their page without ad block restrictions.

It does appear that Cease and Desist Orders are preventing fetching of this cached data in some circumstances.

12ft was cool a year ago. No longer works.

It's been like this for as long as I can remember. Must just not have blocked the cooking portion for some reason.

Honestly who cares about New York Times anyway

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/-/releases

There's a Chrome version too. Updated frequently whenever a site breaks.

Up

I don't get how OP thinks copying the link, opening a new webpage, then loading the page again is more convenient then an add-on like this

Add ONS can capture a lot of your data.

True, this one is open source so I'm not too worried about that though

Does it work on Onlyfans? Asking for a friend

Does not. A friend told me

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Asking the real questions! Friend said.

a friend told me that you can go to coomer.party to find onlyfans content

Please don't try and take income away from sex workers, thanks. You can watch porn for free.

Porn is harmful and cringe and sinful anyways. They dont deserve to get paid for it https://www.yourbrainonporn[dot]com/relevant-research-and-articles-about-the-studies/internet-video-game-addiction/studies-demonstrating-porn-use-or-internet-use-causing-negative-effects-or-neurological-changes/

This is your brain on drugs

Pcp is my fav

a friend told me that you can go to coomer.party to find onlyfans content

Ya with everyone spreading the word about how great this site is, I'm not surprised the number of sites it works on dwindles as they find out and pay them to stop circumventing their paywalls.

This one works every time. https://archive.md/

Thank you SO much. This was the ONLY one on the entire thread that worked for an article I wanted to look at.

Every single time

Shit, this one works.

Just had it fail on a news site 😭

Thanks - it was the only one that allowed me to read a Crain's Chicago Business story mentioning a relative tonight. Thanks again!

Still working. I’ve been trying all day to find a site thank you!

So, we don't want websites to advertise and we don't want websites to use paywalls. How will we fund the creators? Donations?

And local newspapers that already can barely afford to pay to cover the news

I know, let's allow corporations to buy newspapers so we keep the press free...

Better payment models. The choice is usually don’t read it, use a method to bypass it, or pay $10 a month. If you’re a causal reader of the site, only looking for a few articles now and then, a subscription is ridiculous.

Bypassing or going elsewhere is the market saying this service is overpriced. Give me à la carte pricing per article — for a reasonable fee — and we’re in business.

And putting the bypassers aside for a moment, the (likely larger) number of people going elsewhere is a problem in itself. Too often, the reputable news sources are paywalled but the propaganda is free, leading to the post-truth world we’ve got.

Micropayments aren’t just a good idea; they‘re important to keep democracies functioning.

And it’s literally nothing new: when print newspapers were a thing, you could subscribe to get their paper every day — and you might do that for the one paper you usually read. But if another paper had an article you were interested in, you could buy a single issue for less anytime. All that’s missing is for existing news sites and aggregators to set it up.

Most newspaper sites give you a few free articles a month, so casual readers can utilize that.

Yup. And that’s great that they do. I think the issue in this thread is the people who are in the middle: reading enough that they’re hitting a paywall, but still not willing to spring for a monthly subscription.

There’s another pricing model in there somewhere. One where if you purchased an article or a day pass for more than half of the month, a subscription would be cheaper, but still they’re inexpensive enough that the causal reader wouldn’t mind paying for a few.

This sounds great in theory, but the problem you're going to run into are transaction fees. They're small amounts, but if you're relying on microtransactions, they're going to seriously eat into your profit margin. This is why games like Fortnite that rely on microtransactions make you load their monopoly money in increments of $10, even though individual items can cost much less.

Would people be willing to load $10 worth of NYT articles at once? Maybe, but at that point you may as well get a subscription. Unless the newspapers were willing to come together to offer a single payment service.

A single service would be cool. Like I'd load $30 into an account to pay for each article. And getting a subscription to your local paper gives you some credits for other papers.

There is Apple News+, but a lot of local papers are missing.

As someone whose company deals in subscription billing for the newspaper industry, I can tell you that there have been micro payment systems propositioned to the largest media organizations in the US and each one declined. Without a sufficient amount of publications using a micro-payment system; it's worthless. I cannot see such a system coming around unless these organizations suddenly all change their tune.

I'm sorry to tell you that the real issue is that people just want it to be free forever.

Subscriptions for most sites are less than a dinner for 2 at McDs, so fuck those cheapskates in the middle.

If you read more than one newspaper, you'll end up with quite the bill at the end of the month.

You could subscribe to a service like apple news plus which gives you a bunch of news sources. Or your local library probably has free digital access to some newspapers

Apple news is not a available in my country, and the library only offers physical newspapers.

Not much of a bill at all.

Digital annual subscription to the economist is $100 (Black Friday) to $200 CAD. Digital annual subscription to NYT is $26-260 CAD.

That’s $10.50 - 38/ month for more news than you can probably read.

And that would be good if those two were the only ones that I read (and I caught them on sale), but they aren't. I'd end up at 50-100$ a month just to read maybe ten actual quality articles in total not counting copy-pasted agency news). It is absolutely not worth it.

I’d be happy to pay $2/article over that free limit.

Less and less newspapers are doing this. I don't think I've been able to read a WSJ or Economist article in months, for example.

Inkl does this, and it's brilliant. Different payment plans - either a subscription or a pay-per-article (where you pay $10 after reading 100 articles) a decent chunk of which goes to the publishers, and you get access to a lot of reputable and (largely) non-partisan news outlets (i.e. no Murdoch and a lot of the other bigger American news outlets that blatantly push an agenda) including a lot that have paywalls or subscriptions, like The Economist, the Nine/Fairfax newspapers in Australia, NYT, etc. It's a shame that it's not more popular, but as it is now it seems like it doesn't have amazing global coverage (largely Australia and parts of the US) - though in part that's because I'm guessing they need to have discussions with these outlets beforehand, especially if they want to have their paywalled articles on the app. They'll never be able to get the really local and super personalised coverage that Google News gives you.

This is fantastic; great to see the concept out there. Thank you.

use a method to bypass it

I love how you sugarcoat it so it seems a normal choice. It is plain old piracy, and one of the worse because you are making them pay to give you their work. Free market is going to the competition if they have better quality/price, not steal from the higher quality into dumping prices.

Micropayments aren’t just a good idea; they‘re important to keep democracies functioning

This is a HORRENDOUS idea for a free press.

In your dystopian alternate reality the name of the game for a newspaper-editor would be to make articles that sold big on the single article market.

Shareholders would be pushing for articles that does well in the single payer market.

Journalists that write important articles that aren't doing well on the single-article market would get paid less and pushed out of the newspapers.

Fair point. Pay-per-article could cause some trouble too. But editors are already incentivized to run stories that get the most eyeballs either way, and since the digital age, they are most definitely running analytics to see which articles get the most attention. I’m not sure this idea would cause any more harm than what’s already happening… it may only make it more transparent.

Would something like a day pass be better?

But editors are already incentivized to run stories that get the most eyeballs either way

Only free outlets, or very cheap ones, that primarily base themselves on ad revenue.

LA Times, NY Times, The Atlantic, New Yorker etc. do NOT operate that way. Because they know their subsribers do not come from single articles. Their subscribers come because they want to stay informed and read news that are not entertaining, that are not fun, that are not easy to digest.

People pay to get the content beyond the paywall because they know that they will NOT be bombarded with clickbait trash. It's like paying for a cab instead of a bus. Both are good options. But, for some things, the cab is a better option, while for other destinations, the bus is the better option.

That is why their editorial boards insists on resisting the pay-per article urge (they would probably make more money doing so) but it is a model that is not news. It is entertainment.

Good newspapers don't sell articles, they sell the whole package. They give you a view of the world that they think is worth knowing.

I agree that the reputable outlets are selling the whole package, but they’re still running analytics to track the readership and engagement on their articles. They’re just more mature in what they do with the data. Rather than looking to maximize everything, everywhere, all the time — which leads to the trash sites that I think we both don’t like — the reputable sites may be willing to tolerate some articles with more specialized appeal or even ones that upset readers a bit in the name of providing the full picture.

But they’re still watching their analytics with a view to keeping subscribers through quality content that engages their audience. If they have subjects, styles, or individual writers that consistently make readers tune out, changes will happen.

It’s the classic problem of any tool being used for good or evil. Analytics is here to stay — some will use it to create trash that erodes public trust in the name of a short-term profit, and others will use it to curate great content that has value.

And coming back to the original topic, I think no matter what the payment model is, that dynamic will continue. Some profit off misinformation, others profit off of providing quality material. The profit motive is there in both cases — what the editors do with it is all that’s different.

I think no matter what the payment model is

Of course, but one is far more aggressive than the other one.

Much smarter people than you have been thinking about this for a much longer time than you.

The single-article-payment option pops up with some frequency on Facebook when some grandma has had an a-ha moment. But, trust me, the idea is not novel nor good.

There is a reason only a tiny fraction, less than one percent, of news outlets have gone with the single article payment option.

And just when I thought we were getting along. Lol.

Anyway. You mention there’s a reason most news outlets have not gone with that option. I assert it’s not because they’re super smart. It’s a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to meet the market where it is. They’re missing out on a fair number of readers who would be willing to pay for another option if it were available.

Maybe neither of us is going to figure out exactly what that option looks like today, but it’s out there.

You are just salty because you didn't realize you are basically pushing a grandma's Facebook post as the solution to the problems of democracy.

Same problem as streaming tv services.

How will we fund the creators? Donations?

Yes, but only the rich people can be expected to donate.

That sounds… familiar…

If you honestly think the journalists who write articles for the NYT earn money based on clicks to their articles, you're putting way too much faith in a corporation.

[deleted]

And that is exactly why I don't watch the news. I don't even have a TV.

But then who pays them?

The corporation.

And if you think the corporation gives that $1/week (NYT's subscription cost) straight to the journalist, you'd also be wrong.

$4/week isn't enough to begin with.

And if you think Corporation only has to pay the Journalist and there is no other expense, you would be wrong too. Without corporations there is no growth.
We can debate on evil vs good corp. We can debate or provide ways on how to build a new pay system where everyone can benefit but saying corps don't deserve any money, that will just starve everyone including those authors.

Make money off ads that I block, that's the solution

So, we don't want websites to advertise and we don't want websites to use paywalls. How will we fund the creators? Donations?

We have some answers. For example, Brave will pay you a small amount of cryptocurrency to view ads, and you can tip that cryptocurrency to creators.

I’d rather have a sprinkle of ads vs subscription

Corporate media has waaaaay too much power in the US.

As long as they want to support the defunding of independent public media, it’s the only fair way to rebalance public vs corporate interests.

I don’t get peoples problems with ads, as long as the information is still accessible I don’t care

I’m fine with adverts so are most people

This is what NFTs should be for. Article is minted as NFT with smart contract built into code that transfers small amount of money/crypto from users wallet to the writers/publishers wallet. We’re many years away from this though so for now we’ll keep selling garbage jpegs for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

NFTs are not DRM, it doesn't restrict who can or cannot read the article.

[deleted]

Tell me one, and I will try to find a method that works

Edit: Besides the method that OP gave, here are 3 others you can try:

-you can also add a dot to the end of your url (ex: https://www.washingtonpost.com./)
-the bypass paywalls browser extension
-inputting the article url into an archive site like https://archive.is

If none of these methods work, there's a good chance that your site has a hard paywall, which means the data is not actually accessible on the web without an account, in which case there is no way to bypass the paywall.

Spiegel

c‘t

It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users. I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "c‘t"

^Please ^PM ^\/u\/eganwall ^with ^issues ^or ^feedback! ^| ^Code ^| ^Delete

spiegel is a hard paywall, meaning the data is not available without a paid subscription. heisen seems to work fine with the bypass paywalls browser extension.

spiegel is a hard paywall, meaning the data is not available without a paid subscription.

You edited your original comment to add the hard paywall thing. Have the courage and be transparent with your edit.

heisen seems to work fine with the bypass paywalls browser extension.

nope: https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2021/25/2014910113606057486

Your post is what inspired me to edit my original comment, because so many people were messaging me. So I shared my methods and gave additional context. I'm not being deceptive, I'm not even sure how you can accuse me of that.

In portuguese:

https://valor.globo.com/empresas/noticia/2021/11/21/fim-de-desconto-deve-levar-grandes-empresas-de-vale-refeicao-a-justica.ghtml

The only way I see it working is with something like sci hub, where they gather legit logins to those sites and download the content/news from the site and show for free in their own website.

Just like Spiegel, it looks like a hard paywall, which means it's unlikely to be possible to access

Atlantic

Atlantic works fine with the bypass paywalls browser extension. Also, adding a period to the end of the url "www.theatlantic.com./article-name" will also bypass it. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that getting an archive version from https://archive.is will also yield success

Germany? I have not found a single paywall bypass for any sites, and worse the prices are bonkers. Only thing that works is free trial months on a virtual credit card with $0.01 spending limit, but that's so much work.

[deleted]

Fuuuuuck hahah

I would also like to know.... for a friend

Id like to know as well lol

No it does not Chegg is really good at blocking all of these

Just tried it on the NYT and it doesn’t work

try incoggo.com - works on NYTimes and more

This is amazing! Tysm!

Seems like they take money to not show some sites. This Firefox extension has worked on any website I've tried: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/

Is there a chrome version?

Nope. I switched from Chrome to Firefox just to have that extension and this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fastforwardteam/

Both of the above extensions technically have Chrome versions that you can sideload, but were removed because of Google's webstore policies. I think it's inevitable that Google, an advertising company, will also eventually kick adblockers (shoutout to ublock origin and sponsorblock) off of Chrome and everyone that wants a decent web-browsing experience will have to jump ship to Firefox.

Actually there is but you need to install it manually. Should have instructions on the page.

didn't work for porn hub premium

Doesn’t work for wall st journal

try incoggo.com - works on WSJ and more

-Cool Title -Upvote -Oh! Comments must be interesting, let me have look. -Doesn’t work anymore - RAGE

Add "outline.com/" before any url with paywall.

Enjoy.

Has been working for less and less sites lately.

Yup. It's not even worth trying anymore.

Drop the link into the Google translate website (not Google translate in the search, but go to the actual Google translate website)

I've been having more success with archive.is

Works with nothing now

Does this work for academic articles?

If I was not poor I would give you an award.

With all the savings on paywall sites, you’ll be able to. ;)

In a time that true journalism is struggling to keep alive it's sites like this that give it one more nail in the coffin.

If it's just a couple of times it's ok. If you're using it often for same sites, please think of paying it. You are paying for free press.

Remember only major Garbage journalism survive in this kind of world with click baits because of ads revenue. Attracting lots of views for shit

And you wonder why there aren't as many qualified journalists in the industry anymore.

Does anyone actually wonder that?

Does it work on porn

Although it is important to help support sites you frequent, I have used this website for blocked recipes. It works most times. https://cachedview.com/

Neither works for WSJ

This tool was once good but due to posts like this, it just doesn’t work anymore.

I personally prefer to use this extension on either Firefox or any Chrome-based web browser instead: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/releases

It works wonders for me, so far.

YSK: That youare not entitled.

Do you feel entitled to have access to another person's work if they feel that they should be compensated for doing the work? Just because it's easy to sneak into a theater and watch the show doesn't make it right. I wouldn't trust anyone who does such things because it reveals a great deal about the person's essential character.

Howl all you like. Nobody likes to be called a thief, especially a theif. Nobody hates being called a liar more than the liar.

Bring on the hate. I'm actually looking forward to it I plan to use it in an essay for school. I will be glad to give you credit if you provide you're name. I don't expect this comment to be visible for very long because of all the down arrows.

This is like “I hate cash registers in book stores. Why can’t Barnes and Noble just operate like a library?”

Is it wrong for content creators to be compensated by those interested in their content?

Yes because then I can't have the content for free.

Regardless, this all boils down to internet piracy arguments. If I was never going to pay a newspaper site any money to begin with, and then I simply read their article (which takes no resources from the paper for me to read it) then how is that wrong? Ive taken nothing from them and they've lost no potential profits since I would've never paid for it anyway.

But if the content is available freely to everyone, there is no incentive for people who are willing to pay for it to actually do so. Which makes it difficult to run a functioning business.

Newspapers, in particular, are having this problem. Tons of smaller papers have shut down, and even a lot of the large ones are struggling. It is tough to get by when the price people have come to expect for news is free.

I understand yours reasons here, but I think the journalists who produce these pieces deserve to be paid?

If you really want to read the article, get the 1$ or so a month subscription that’s usually on offer, and cancel. Which yes I know can be a pain in the ass, but it’s a much bigger pain in the ass to produce this content.

And no I’m not saying I’ve never used reader view to skirt a paywall, but since becoming a freelance writer myself I know how much work it takes to produce this content.

Imagine having to wake up at 2 am to revise a 1,200 article with some new developments, having to turn it in oh say an hour? That’s the life of many journalists, it’s not easy

I mean, it's a bit of a testament to the industry's problems that it's just plain easier to bypass the paywall. People pay for convenience, but if paying is actively less convenient, there is an issue with how things are monetized.

To borrow from another industry, steam made a name for itself by being more convenient than pirating games. It wasn't that people didn't want to pay for games, it was that it was easier to get games by pirating them than obtaining them legitimately. And that is the situation that paywalled news articles are in currently.

I see your point. It’d be interesting to see different publications experiment with things outside the realm of subscriptions.Imagine if you could pay flat monthly rate to read a few articles from different papers each month. Or even based on how much/how many you read …

Apple news is kinda like this I guess

Have you tried using your local library membership to access newspapers behind paywalls?

YSK: If you want content and journalism, those people need to get paid somehow. Pay for your news, goddamnit.

I'm all for paying for content, but I don't want to sign up for an automatically renewing subscription to read a couple of articles. If I could pay for a month without having to cancel at the end, or I could pay per article, or I could pay a fee that gives me credits to see x number of articles that don't expire I would be far more likely to do it. Subscriptions are great for heavy users, but they are way too expensive for occasional users.

Subscriptions are a model that works for the majority. I'm not going to sit here and defend companies that make it a hassle to cancel - that's a shitty business practice however you see it.

But this idea of paying per article, or for x amount of articles, is fundementally flawed. It won't result in good journalism, it'll make it even worse.

A newsroom is a weird construction. Some stories, like yesterday's footy results or a quick analysis on a quarterly report from a business, can be churned out in no time. They're not very expensive to make. Other stories are long, and some of them are investigative pieces that take forever, require travel, legal council and lots more. The former stories essentially pay for the latter - they pad the pages so the FOIA savants can dig out the good stuff in peace.

The main problem, especially with per-article payment, is that some stories are dead ends. Sometimes, your story just collapses, and the clever thing to do is dump it.

At the same time, everything that's problematic with modern journalism would be cranked to 11 with this system. You think clickbait is bad now? Or the race to be first, even if you're not completely sure that you're right is a problem? With the system you propose, all of that is encouraged an order of magnitude more.

I'm not sure what news subscriptions cost where you are, but I just checked what WaPo would cost me. Granted, I'm in Europe, so YMMV, but their normal, non-discounted price is $60 a year.

Denmark is notorious for having incredibly expensive news outlets, and my subscription costs me around $50 a month. Sure, not everyone can afford it, but plenty people can.

You could make a group subscription, where you pay X a month to access a limited number of articles on different newspapers. The subscription model only works for heavy users that read only one or two news sites.

around $50 a month.

That's incredibly expensive if the only thing you want is to read one or two articles that you see linked on somewhere else.

This kind of group subscription would also either encourage clickbait competiton or only work with newspapers owned by the same parent company.

It's incredibly expensive if you only read one or two articles, yeah. But maybe you should read more - and use it as your primary news source instead of reddit. That's probably heathy too.

This kind of group subscription would also either encourage clickbait competiton or only work with newspapers owned by the same parent company.

Except that Apple News does it, but it's not available everywhere. It only encourages clickbait competition if the share depends on clicks.

It's incredibly expensive if you only read one or two articles, yeah. But maybe you should read more - and use it as your primary news source instead of reddit. That's probably heathy too.

Maybe you shouldn't assume my news habits. I don't use Reddit for news. When I say I end up reading one or two articles, it's per news source: that's the usual output of articles that are maybe interesting and are not copy-paste from news agencies. And I'm not paying 50$ a month to maybe read one or two articles from a single newspaper with information that I probably could find by myself if I was specially interested in it.

[deleted]

... who do you think fund them, if not the readers? That's how you get advertisements disguised as news.

So... companies should work for free for the working class just because they ......are a big company?

So... companies should work for free for the working class just because they ......are a big company?

According to reddit, yes. Once you get over a mythical imaginary money line, your rights stop existing and you're only good for being a money pinata.

no

What, you think you can pull investigative journalism out the ass? It takes work.

I don't think the issue is payment in itself, it's more about the price for a casual user. It's a difficult trade off for everyone - I don't think there is a clear solution and proven model yet

I can tell you from the inside that news orgs are starved. Go ask /r/journalism how much they get paid. People don't want to pay for journalism anymore, and it's so incredibly weird that so few people consider that someone needs to get paid.

I totally get it, what I'm saying is there is something that needs to be optimised in the payments side of things to improve how much they get paid.

YSK this Doesn’t work. I just tried it.

Everybody wants news, but nobody wants to pay for news.

I'm all good paying if it's something I use frequently. But most of the time someone posts a story on Reddit (or elsewhere) and I just want to see that one damned story without subscribing to something I will rarely if ever use again.

Wow I can read the news again thank you

Maybe you should consider paying for quality journalism instead of just expecting people to do Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations for free.

Right? Journalists are already underpaid as is. And people wonder why the industry is in decline.

YSK: people who write for a living cannot do so if you do not pay them for their work.

Archive.fo is my go to.

still have paywall

People will use these bypass methods and then go on to talk about how pIrAtInG iS iMmOrRaL. Same thing, different media.

But...then how does the creator get paid? I agree that post-scarcity would be nice, but this attitude is pretty much what's leading to Sinclair owning a shit load of media.

This doesn't work on many websites - I believe WSJ is one.

I'm confused. How is it a hassle to download a plug-in once rather than having to go to some website and paste in links manually every time?

I'm just annoyed that the "2 Ingredient Mashed Potatoes" recipe has 4 ingredients. You don't even have to scroll. It's the title and the ingredients list right underneath.

I suppose it’s risk free are fucking assholes

"Paywalls" that can be defeated by sites like archive.org or a Google cache aren't actually paywalled. They've already delivered the content, which you can view by undoing the things they've done to the page to hide said content. The NYT article you give as an example just needs the modal pop-up deleted and overflow set back to auto rather than hidden. This is called a "soft paywall," as compared to an actual paywall which will not give you the thing unless you pay/subscribe/login/etc. Pretty misleading tip there.

Doesn't work on the Athletic

ooo...Im saving this post, and hopefully I remember itfor when I need it

Another good one is sci-hub.se for scientific research papers.

I’m not that bothered by pay walls to be honest, if it’s good journalism it’s ok to pay for it.

blocked for business insider

YSK that those people earn a living through ads and subscriptions

"I hate paywalls" Do you love the pay wall when you go buy a coffee or a hamburger or do you also steal those?

"You wouldn't download a car would you?"

"You wouldn't download a car would you?"

Fuck yes I would.

Ones real and ones virtual and has ads and one actually is useful and worth money

Well produced and unbiased journalism is probably one of the most useful and important things in a democracy. To say otherwise is pretty ignorant.

And to capitalize on some of the most important information in the world and make sure that the poor are unable to understand said information is disgusting and just shows how greedy of a country we have become.

As far as I know, journalists have never worked for free and newspapers has always cost something. I don't know what country you speak of but I'll guess. USA. You have some brilliant media outlets like NYT, NPR, WSJ, Politico delivering top notch journalism. Expecting them to be free in the epicenter of capitalism is just plain stupid. Sorry dude. In my country we have "free" and accessible for all ad freenews that are funded by the state through taxes. It's really neat

Do you skip out on paying the bill at restaurants too? Or what about at the mechanic?

Journalism is work just like anything else. I agree it's frustrating that newsworthy information gets placed behind a paywall, but people who are good at their jobs deserved to get paid just like anyone else. Journalists are already underpaid and underappreciated as is. Pay for the product or go to a site that doesn't charge.

I'd steal an apple once in a while if the grocery store that I don't visit often required a subscription model to get groceries, with you needing a different subscription for every different store you visit.

Breaking news will be covered by other outlets. If you can't afford quality journalism (like quality groceries) go to a free news website. If something is exclusive to a certain outlet, they probably worked really hard to do that and should be rewarded accordingly.

they probably worked really hard to do that and should be rewarded accordingly.

Except that the only way they let me reward that content is by a monthly subscription, and most of the times it isn't worth it (not only the price, but the hassle of subscribing and then stopping the automatic renewal), so instead of not reading the article and not paying them, I'll read the article, maybe share it if I like and not pay them. It's actually better for them.

Most premiere outlets have an introductory price for that reason exactly. Every single person uses your same reasoning — everyone's the main character who actually has a good reason for shorting these workers.

Most outlets I end up on don't allow free articles anymore.

I don't claim to have a good reason. I say that I won't subscribe just to read one or two articles, it doesn't make sense. Given that, if the article is interesting enough I'll try to bypass the firewall, but most of the time I don't. In any case, I just don't pay them because they don't offer me a convenient option.

You obviously don't know how websites make money....its not our job to pay journalists. That's the companies and their advertisers

If journalists would actually be honest, I would have no problem paying. The problem is that all they do is lie.

Then why do you read the news in the first place if all they do is lie?

I don’t read the news from mainstream sources. I look for actual original sources. That’s how I knew, a year ago, that Kyle Rittenhouse had acted in self defense.

So advices on how to steal are allowed here?

You also have extensions like unpaywall and bypass paywalls clean

A very simple trick is to enter ./ after .com.

So fore example you go to www.example.com and discover it's behind a paywall, you can first try to edit the url with www.example.com./

Just tried it on OP's example, no go.

Yeh, it's hit or miss as well, but the simplest to try first

YSK that paying 4 bucks a month for the NYT helps pay for real news and actual journalism.
I ain't saying not to take advantage of internet loopholes if you can't afford it, but if you can, you should support good news organizations. Newspapers have been closing down at an alarming rate.

NYT is known for its liberal bias and fake news when it comes to politics. That is one reason that newspapers are going out of business - they try to manipulate the news. There are sites on the internet that are more balanced.

Хорошая попытка, товарищ. Как сегодня погода в Ольгино?
Give me one example of deliberate fake news by the NYT. And if by liberal bias you mean fact-based, then I agree.
I'm genuinely curious to know which "balanced" websites you are referring to, because I get my news from other sources besides the NYT, and I wonder if they're the same ones.

I know this is 5 days old and in Reddit minutes that's like a year, but I'd just like to say thanks.

You can have my free Reddit award because I don't have money to buy anything else just like I didn't have money to bypass that paywall that your link just ignored like I ignore my mental anguish: abruptly and completely.

Thank you, OP!

Why on earth do so many people feel entitled to getting everything on the Internet for free? I hate getting paywalled too, but I stop to consider that if I don't feel it's worth my money, it's probably not actually worth my time, either.

Especially when it comes to news and the like, it's the places that are "free" (typically with egregious advertisement abuse) that are the most absolute dreck, and it is none of our interests to drive everything to their level.

A post truly worthy of a helpful award

Or you could, you know, pay for journalism

Tried this I think on the guardian and the athletic articles and didn't seem to work at all 😔

what? the guardian doesn't even have a paywall

Can't remember first one, numerous articles though, definitely the athletic though

Haha here's how to steal articles!

And this comment is getting down voted.

The people creating these websites deserve to be compensated for their work.

Servers and engineers cost money just like new stands and paper does. How is this different from grabbing a paper and running off?

Stealing is stealing.

They make shit click bait articles that are filled with lies and agenda pushing, fuck them.

Then why do you want to read the article?

I don’t? Just support people who don’t pay them

So you want other people to read lies and click bait?

No? If they are gonna do it any way and I can’t stop them because it’s their bloody choice I’m happy at least they aren’t supporting them by giving them money. What are you trying to do? Nitpick my comments? Honestly

What are you trying to do? Nitpick my comments? Honestly

Welcome to the internet. First day?

But yeah, I'm hung up on your being happy about the spread of misinformation, as long as it's stolen. You said it. You expect me to send you money because of its awesomeness? Share it amongst all my friends? If you're going to say it, stand by it, don't whine about people noticing the holes in your statement.

Dude what? Jokes in my statement? I said I was happy people pirated it not that they read it? You assumed some thing that was completely incorrect and then still acted like it was fact, that’s how dumb you are.

Yeah, except you already said what people are stealing is misinformation. It's not like everything you wrote before doesn't count because you didn't write it in the first post. That's how dumb you are, you forgot what you wrote like a post prior. But hey, I bet you felt really smart calling me dumb. Like a real big boy. So self assured. So confident.

Yup- everyone bitches about ads, but won't pay for the articles either. Apparently journalists should work for free.

The profits don't go to the labour and you know it.

Any extra revenue squeezed out of readers, on top of ads and sponsors, won't raise anyone's pay except marketing, CEO and some share price the journos will never be able to touch.

If it’s worth you reading it’s worth you paying for.

Except that I can't pay for one article, I need a goddamn subscription to every single newspaper out there just to read a few articles a month on different sites, or buy a subscription to a site just to read an article someone linked to me. It doesn't make sense. Unless they start making group subscriptions or something more accesible for casual readers, you'll have sites to bypass pay walls.

Have you considered Apple News? It kind of does what you're looking for.

It's not available for me and for the media I read. I'd consider it (although 10 bucks a month just for the handful of articles I read is fairly expensive) but the subscription per newspaper model is stupid.

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription

I don't know how many people will see this, but a subscription to the NYT is $1 a week, about $4 a month. No commitment, cancel anytime you want.

If you find yourself clicking on their links a lot, just buy a subscription. It is very cheap.

Or you could pay for the content you consume.

Wow, this doesn’t work at all.

Free the internet. Make the internet free again. 😄

This is great! I personally see online content as something that just comes from nowhere, so it's cool that there's a way of viewing it without spending any money. When I seek out content online it's important that either A) It's suffocated with advertisements, or B) The people making it receive no money for their efforts, ensuring that content will become worse over time. It's stuff like this that will save the internet :)

Very helpful!

Good on you OP!

Joining the chorus of thank you's

If you go to the Google translate website you can copy the link and paste it in translate and it will give you a clean link

If you want NYT recipes, just copy the url and paste it in an app called Paprika 3. It's a lot easier and saves the recipe, so you only have to do it once

This is just stealing?

That's really cool. Thanks.

Guys... Just pay. If their content is so good. They deserve some money for it. Stop ruining the internet for everyone.

If you're on iPhone safari turning on the reader view as soon as the page opens gets past some site's paywalls

YES such a good YSK

Or just turn javascript off in the websites permissions

Dope, is there a way I can get an artist's work for free as well? I mean fuck the time and effort it takes a journalist to write something.

So you think its ok to not pay people for their work?

Mmm, some of you may be too young to remember this but you used to have to buy a newspaper or magazine in order to read the articles. Anyway you try to slice it, using these websites, extensions is no different than shoplifting a sports illustrated years ago

Could you steal a sports illustrated and give it to a billion people? Physical content is not like digital content. Your conflation only serves greed.

Do you think the people behind the digital content don’t deserve payment for their work? How do you think digital content is created? People do not work for free.

Lmao , and I guess drugs are bad too , huh ?

They are lazy ass thieves, that’s what it comes down to. Entitled lazy thieves.

Forgot all about this comment I made. Guess Reddit has a lot of shoplifting members if I got 5 downvote

OR, and hear me out, I could just continue to close out every tab I open that comes up with a "subscribe to read" warning. Because even using a site like this is more effort than it's worth.

Maybe if it was a chrome plugin that required no effort on my part other than maybe clicking a button that pops up on the screen.

How about just pay for the content you want and stop being a thief???

stop normalizing that shit on reddit, it should be against rules to shill paywalled sites

OP's recipe example doesn't paywall me, so I guess something I'm using already gets around it. I wonder what it is lol.

What a great list, thank you gentlemen.

"How do you expect when Lebron left?

I just disable javascript on the NYTimes and have no issues.

Too much work browser extension me so my lazy ass doesn’t have to do anything extra

You can also pay $5 a month for a reading app like pocket that gets the whole article and saves it for you. Worth it to me.

Typing readify.me before the website's url usually works. In the Firefox browser then is an add-on called script switch which toggles on/off and works most of the time.

After somebody posted in a very popular thread with this

I just use a private browser/open in DuckDuckGo. 99% of the time that works.

I’ve found that on some sites if on mobile I can turn airplane mode on quick enough to avoid the paywall block loading

“Apple didn’t get yourself into trouble

Android app Article Reader works on some, including the NYT. You sometimes have to give it a minute because it can be slow to parse the page, but it often works.

Or just send it to Pocket lol

This is would be actually really useful for me, since a lot of websites I enter for research amd study always asl me for money

Just turn off Javascript https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/4odkzi/lpt_turn_off_javascript_to_get_around_paywalls/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Tell this to/rall

Most paywall elements are blockable by adblockers. Don't use any of the sites that will just screw you in other ways and block them permanently yourself without ever having to go elsewhere

What's a paywall?

A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of decline in paid print readership and advertising revenue, partly due to the use of ad blockers.

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall

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I searched high and low

Do you mean the /r/AskReddit thread from a few days ago?

Yeah, I've never found a site that I want to read, that this actually worked on.

Also- great for removing pointless bullshit on popular sites- especially useful for all those recipe sites with way-to-muchbullshit floating around. All are removed.

YSK not to post shit like this unless you want it to get taken down

I have mixed feelings about this. Should news be free? If it is, who pays the ones writing it and how might their biases effect the news?

Ideally we would pay for news, and in return get professional investigative journalism. I'm not saying such an institution exists but I don't see any other way to get news that represents me other than to pay for it.

You know what Reddit wants to use this for

Asking for my hand, does this work on porn sites

Oof, scratch 12ft from usability soon. On to the next one

What do you mean?

YTRMVP

Ah, yes, I too saw this post on r/AskReddit yesterday.

12ft.io

Clicked it now. NYT seems to have rectified it

Tried it on Quora and it didn't work.

PrintFriendly also doesn't work as well

Amazing

nothing works for spiehel.de spiegel plus articles

YSK: sci hub can be used for scholarly journals

How about F12 ladder

Nifty

You are my new hero!! Thank you!!! Got me into NYTIMES cooking😇

What is paywall and what are y’all talking about I wanna be informed

Use browser extensions

does it work for patreon?

I'd like a way to view my local paper if possible? The Modesto Bee. You only get like 3 articles and then you hit the paywall. I used to be able to get around but not anymore.

I've found that sites that do this is setting a 'cookie' counter. Wiping the cookie usually works. Look for a self destructing cookies extension. You can set what you want to keep & what to destroy.

Try outline.com as well. You can go there and paste your paywalled link into the text-box, or you can just use the browser bar to go directly to outline.com/[your paywalled link]

I'd like to add that for several paywall sites, if you're fast enough you can do a quick Ctrl+A as soon as the site loads followed immediately by Ctrl+C. That'll select and copy the text respectively. If you do this before the pop-up notice appears, you will have fetched the article and can paste it in text software or a temporary Google doc. Not as clean as using a website, but it's what I had to work with when this concept first began cropping up.

hopefully these will work on power thesaurus

I've never been able to find a site that can successfully pass the one at America's Test Kitchen, without turning the result into Lorem Ipsum. Like with this recipe. If it even removes the paywall prompt, this happens.

Doesn't work in most paywalled websites I use like hs.fi and mikrobitti.fi

Nice

You should know that companies need revenue to continue providing you content you want. That’s why “adwalls” exist. It is unlikely to happen, but if enough folks bypass ads altogether, you could see your websites die out.

I think most of us are upset with "pay walls", not "ad walls". Print and online publishers make a ton of money selling advertising. Why be greedy and make us pay to read decent content?

I hear you. I am thinking of something like The New York Times. If I recall correctly, they are a paywall site. They make the choice to ask for an upfront payment (which is extremely low) to give you a quality reading experience without a million ads flying at your face. I don’t see that as greedy when it’s just a choice of how to bring the revenue (tons of ads or no/less ads with money up front). Part of it is control of the revenue, the quality of the experience you want for your customers to distinguish from the competition, etc.

All true! NYT is less expensive then most, AND if you're looking for something from the past, most of their articles are archived and can be read free of charge.

Do you know if there is a way to bypass the paywall of Nebula ?

Doesn't work on TheBlockCrypto.com

God bless you!

What is paywall !?

Here's the thing I was never going to pay for news, I won't buy a newspapper - I'm interested in the article - but not that interested so if I can't access free Im not gonna buy

Stick an advert in their sure, but I will never pay to read an article

I don't know if thats a generational thing - but there's enough 'free' news out there, so why would I pay $10 a month or whatever to read your take on it?

Newspapers I think are likely to all but vanish in the next 25/50 years as the next few generations don't buy them....will that translate to online subscriptions, I just don't think so

How is going to a unique website, input URL for each site you want to visit more convenient than downloading a browser extension one time?

This doesn't work with the lubbockonline.com
I think getting through the gannett media is way too hard because I've been trying forever. Please lemme know if you find a way.

What is a paywall?

A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of decline in paid print readership and advertising revenue, partly due to the use of ad blockers.

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall

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Is there one specially for academic studies? I thought I heard about one on a podcast.

YSK, seems 12ft does not work for some popular news site like Wall Street Journal and New York Times. You can try out this automation that can often bypass even hard paywalls.
https://www.bardeen.ai/playbooks/remove-paywall - Works on the Economist and NYT.

I have my own technique I have been using for years to get around the NYT paywall: https://twitter.com/_GAKR/status/1436086483081994243?t=uhvLw1yZ52nNRVYKx7raHw&s=19

Amazing thanks for the tip!

you are a godsend

BRO 😭 I just used this on a NYT Tiramisu recipe! Thank you SO MUCH!

Just tried to do cnbc and it doesn't work anymore.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/10/morgan-stanley-upgrades-chinese-tiktok-rival-kuaishou-to-overweight.html

This is awesome. Thank you.

12ft has been disabled for this site

defeats the purpose

who made this site? it's not working anymore :/

thanks for the print one!

Based on u/userseven suggestion, here's a bookmarklet to automate searching for the article

javascript: window.location = "https://web.archive.org/web/*/" + window.location.protocol + '//' + window.location.hostname + window.location.pathname;

Notes:

  1. I leave it as an exercise for the reader how to use bookmarklets in their favorite browser.
  2. I've spent exactly 10 minutes on this. It works for NYT articles. YMMV.
  3. Feedback welcome.

People don’t work for free. Having access to their work and they lose money because lazy, shiftless thieves think they are entitled to whatever and believe that payment for time put into their creations shouldn’t exist.

YSK: If you properly set up your shit you don't get paywalls.

I clicked your paywalled link(PC), no paywall. Opened it on my phone, no paywall. Every time I see people bitching in the comments I'm just like "what paywall?"

Idk why you got downvoted but I also didn't get the paywall from that example recipe link. I am wondering if ublock origin already contains a workaround by default?

Edit: yep, ublock origin gets around this one at least. Still can't get into WSJ stuff tho.

"I hate pay-walls" is just another way of saying that you're a thief.

you wouldn't download a car

I wish I could give you a digital high five for being awesome. Oh wait I got the times...a digital elbow bump.

SAVING THIS FOR MY HOMEWORK GOOGLING

This'll get taken down sooner or later, people get paid for the articles, but if they don't make any money then they'll fire em.

Outline.com

Ctrl SHIFT N

Outline.com as well

It doesn't work on some sites (NY times for example), but disabling java script works.

Doesn't work for any news source I tried it with that is worth remotely anything.

Fuck off with your spam.

Sometimes it works. Most of the time it doesn’t work. It’s free so…

Putting anti fingerprinting add ons /javascript switcher will get you into any website that isn't a hard paywall.

VPNs for region blocked websites.

When i asked if op is attracted to girls under 16 years of age i didn't get a reply

Don’t 12ft the economist. We need to support our genuine journalists. Do this to crap sites

Try 'Behind The Overlay' chrome extension - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-overlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme?hl=en. Once installed, press ctrl + shift + x to remove the overlay and access to the article. Still haven't found anything to access subscriber only articles. Would love to know if any fellow redditors have.

What is a Paywall? A site that ensures content producers are paid for their time and material.

How would you like it if I met you on Friday after work and took your paycheck?

Sorry to be the jerk here but my daughter is in sales and marketing in a digital media environment and all y'all are stealing from her. She has worked for everything she has ever had. I even made her buy her 1st car. So please stop stealing everyone.

A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of decline in paid print readership and advertising revenue, partly due to the use of ad blockers.

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall

This comment was left automatically (by a bot). If I don't get this right, don't get mad at me, I'm still learning!

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Newspapers began instituting paywalls because nobody was buying their papers but still reading their news. This caused 75% of the local newspapers to fail, which is why Biden spending spree includes tax breaks for local newspaper companies. It is a subsidy to pay for their expenses, such as labor, and keep the companies afloat. These companies are tanking because people like you are bypassing their paywalls and reading the fruits of their hard work for free.

Don't get me wrong, I always use the deals to get my news, then cancel, then renew at better terms. But I still pay because I believe people should be payed for their work and expenses incurred.

Journalism should be free to read otherwise I really could care less about it.

Honey, the people "stealing" from her are the executives at the company for which she works. Media companies make a shit-ton of money selling advertising. Trust me-- the CEO does not need another vacation home in Tuscany or a bigger yacht.

She makes 5% commission so if you steal something shes is selling you are stealing from her.

Is she the corporate CEO? NO!! The CEO could take a small cut in his bloated pay and give all the salespeople a decent raise instead of making a paltry 5% commission the way their salespeople increase their pay. By the way-- when you eat at a restaurant, do you tip your server at least 15%? YOU SHOULD!! They get paid LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE because their employers expect them to earn the rest, and some employers tell the waiters of they want a raise, work harder.

And, for the record, I am not "stealing" a damned thing from anyone. I simply don't use pay wall articles, nor have I bypassed them. And I'll bet you $100 that, at some point in time, your daughter owned a pirated CD. THAT is actual THEFT. If you don't understand why, do some research into intellectual property.

Baby, I am 52. I was working in a restaurant at 15. Had an efficiency and 73 Fastback Mustang at 16. Graduated honors at 18. Have a MS now. Before my baby girl graduated and moved, she learned real education; we always had a "summer fun job" [in addition to my real job that requires up to 60 hours/week] at a heavy metal concert venue nearby. She depended and still does depend on tips [depending on her side gigs] because she only got paid $10/hr.

Fact is, I showed my baby girl how to make it. She went without a lot, including TV. She just turned 21 and bought her 1st house and tips a lot [as do I] in addition to giving 10% weekly to charities. You are a thief, pay for the things you want, otherwise, do what we did and go with out!

"Baby", I'm 61 and not impressed at all. If a 5% commission is going to break her, she needs a better job at a place that values its employees-- the ones actually working and keeping the company afloat-- more than some idiot, fast cat CEO.

What's your MS in anyway? Mine is in business.

Strategic Leadership. How about I steal, I mean take, 5% of your paycheck every week. If you agree, you can send it to me every week. That should compensate my 21 year old daughter for your theft.

If it's not part of her base pay, it's not part of her paycheck unless she makes the sale. You seem as woefully unaware of the difference between "salary" and "commission" as you are incapable of comprehension. Go back and read my first response where I said I don't read pay-walled things. I'm not stealing a penny from anyone. Try again, toots.

Yeah, this site doesn't work. I've tried it in multiple news papers, none that it works on.

Nice

The search continues

Just tested it for myself, it works excellently! I've been putting off getting a NY times subscription, so this is gonna save me loads

That's really cool!

King

What is this

.

NYT says no. WSJ as well.

Doesn’t work with Chegg

I came here to see if Chegg can get unlocked but It was definitely a tall order, an order that couldn't be filled, but thanks alot anyway !

Just use one of the archive sites.

What? Please explain.

Is there such a website for websites that have essays on them? Like bartleby?

Saved.

Can't you get around most paywalls by disabling JavaScript?

works on local newspaper web site. doesn't work on sites like bloomberg

Most of the time you can just go into your Chrome settings and disable Java for that website. No extensions required. It worked on your recipe link.

Click on the lock icon just to the left of the URL, go to site settings, then set Javascript to "block". Go back and refresh the page.

Some sites have wised up to it and won't display any content unless you allow Javascript.

The bypass paywalls extension works great for the press. Quite effortless once you've installed it, and you can find tutorials on how to install it easily

There's an extension that does it?

Anyone know of one that works for Bloomberg?

This is vastly better. It’s an extension, is maintained, and works for virtually everything:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Ysk + LFP: if something has a paywall, just click on other google searches. If its nowhere else and only on that paywall site, maybe it was never anything worth, but if its really something you care about, then you find yourself in a 0.1% scenario of needing it and you might already forgot the site to use to access it but if you know it exist you can just google it. Tl;dr: just find better sources

does it work for research papers?

Saved !

browser extensions sre better.

You can also disable JavaScript on a site to bypass the paywall popup. This also works for sites that harass you over adblock. If you're using Chrome on a desktop, you can click the lock icon that shows up to the left of the URL, click "site settings", find JavaScript and change it from "allow (default)" to "block".

Not sure how to do it on mobile or in other browsers but I doubt it's very hard. I learned about this like 2 weeks ago and it's 100% improved my internet usage.

does it work with chegg etc.?

This doesn't work for Wirecutter or some other new York times websites though...

Do they take money from them?

How is this more convenient than an extension that you don’t even need to think about?

Na I'm good. Trash capitalism and govt corruption

I gave it a try: 12ft was disabled for the site and then Reddit crashed

Nice

.

Damn, I would just hit the stop button on my browser before the paywall loads but this is next level.

no work for bloomberg unfortunately

nice

Ok

Doesn't work for The Daily Beast.

N

What about sites for college papers, etc? I could really use one as a study guide for an upcoming test.

outline.com works for some sites.

There’s also the shortcut called paywall.

I use this bypass it works on most of the paywall sites I visit. NY Times is one of them that it works with.

What's a paywalled site?

A website you can't use without paying for it.

Why would people wanna know more about what they think should know than what is known to mankind simply made?? Wth is this abt. -c