12ft had a few months of being great, but I think they ended up selling out or giving in to legal pressure, and doesn't do anything on several major news outlets anymore
archive.is/archive.ph the one mentioned in the main post and one that is most effective out of all the options
12ft Ladder - What I like about 12ft.io is that once it gets rid of the paywall, it makes sure the website stays as the mobile site (if you're using your phone), whilst archive.ph uses the desktop form by default. However, 12ft.io does not work as well as archive.ph
Remove Paywall - Even more limited than 12ft.io, but it's another alternative. As the site says, make sure to add RemovePaywall.com/ ahead of the URL if you want to copy the unpaywalled link.
Chip - The most limited option out of all four, I think. Another disadvantage is that I don't think you can copy the unpaywalled version's link, unlike the others.
You copy the URL to the paywalled article, paste it in archive. In most cases, someone else has already archived it already and it's ready to view.
I also use Bypass Paywalls for Firefox in the browser, this takes care of less intrusive paywalls - for the big boys (big news orgs) the archive.is solution is the best.
On Firefox, usually reader mode ignores paywalls. It is also nice for showing pages in a standard format, ignoring the styles of the site, which is nice for sites with crap layouts.
Just as a side note (and I'm not advocating for anything, I just think it's good for people to think things through and have the full picture), the reason why many publications went to a subscription model is that so many people started using ad blockers. The publications have staff who want to be paid for the job they do, and other expenses like server infrastructure. They used to pay for all of that by selling ads on their sites, but then people found ways to avoid seeing ads, so the advertisers didn't want to pay for them anymore.
So the publications had a choice between shutting their doors or charging a subscription, and many chose the latter. Now people are using techniques like this to avoid the subscriptions. The publications will either have to figure out a more effective paywall, come up with a different business model, or go out of business.
I wish the micropayments model people were proposing twenty years ago had taken off. I don’t have any interest in subscribing to The New York Times, for example, because I just don’t read it very much, but I wouldn’t object to paying a few cents every time I happened to read one of their articles.
Yeah, I agree that model is more tenable. Honestly, if the websites hadn't gotten so riddled with completely obnoxious ads, people might have been less motivated to use ad blockers when they were first available. Our older two kids were teenagers in those days, and told us we should start using them. I told them the same thing about the business model, and they just insisted that the content should be free. I said then, and I say now, that's unrealistic. I know I wouldn't work a full time job for no pay, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to.
Yes, it's a weird one. We got used to the fact that everything is pretty much free on the internet. Unfortunately, nothing is free, we either pay with out personal data, watching and interacting with ads or through subscriptions and paywals.
There is just no incentive for people to provide good content on the internet unless they have other means of sustaining themselves or they charge for it.
For instance, there is so much free stuff thanks to developers making their hard work open source. However, they are only able to do it because even if they are not getting payed for this, either they have a job that pays for other work they do or they have access to other means of financial support like family for instance. And I am not saying that much of open source (not all) is not essentially people giving away their hard work for free but I am saying that if the choice was to make some program for free and go hungry or charge for it and have a meal then we all know what it would look like.
Almost makes it seem like a UBI would be a good way to support the people who do work that no one wants to actually pay for (usually because the people avoiding payment aren't getting paid enough in the first place)
A lot of articles load all of the content before the paywall, so another easy (but kind of scuffed) option is to just stop the page from loading after the content has loaded but before the paywall has
A lot of paywalls disappear when you turn off javascript. I use a plugin that adds a button to quickly toggle javascript for specific web pages. It works for a large percentage of paywalled articles. On the few paywalled sites where I actually use javascript, it is easy to just turn it back on again when needed. The plugin I use is JavaScript Switcher, but there are others out there.
I did not know about reader mode. It seems that it is unavailable for some websites, so it can still be useful to switch off JavaScript in those cases.
There's also txtify.it, which bypasses paywalls and reduces the content down to plaintext. It looks like butt in Chrome (due to Chrome's poor handling of plaintext sites), but Firefox does a better job. Works like 12ft.io, just replace the https:// at the start of your URL with txtify.it/
nice :) im making a lemmy account on lemmy.studio and will wait until they approve my account to give it a try! Might use both kbin and lemmy for fun haha
Wow, I remember using this service a few times on ukpolitics sub as it was on pretty much all posts. Never realised it works like this, I just put a newscientist article link in and can read the whole article. Thanks