There is also https://12ft.io/ as well as the “Bypass Paywalls” extension in Firefox
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
527 points (99.3% liked)
You Should Know
33018 readers
1911 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
12ft doens't always work for me for some reason, depends on the site. But I've never had archive not work. But yes there are many options
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
That's my experience, as well. It worked great for a while but I have no luck with it anymore
These are the ones I use -
-
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.
+1 on archive.is/archive.ph
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.
Could you please add a "Why YSK:"? It's rule #2. Thank you. :)
added
Anyone else from Reddit feeling weird seeing this exchange?
I’m from Reddit; why is this weird?
Because of how civil it is compared to reddit maybe
oh yeah now I get it. I think my question would have just been downvoted there...
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.
+1. I accidentally stumbled upon that one day and it's been great since then.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
I was perfectly fine with having header/footer/banner ads and left my adblocker off, unfortunately almost all advertisements have become so obnoxiously placed and irritating. If they weren't so greedy, I feel like most people would have been okay with it.
I'm okay with my physical newspaper running ads too but not putting super intrusive ones or the ones that are disguised as actual reporting.
Exactly. All the ads that cover the content, have X's that you can barely hit without clicking the ad, have autoplay videos, and that kind of thing just made it unlivable.
Exactly. It makes me wonder why no one has tried a more ethical advertising model. It seems to be either intrusive ads or paying a subscription.
I was ok with some ads also, and still would be. What grinds my gears is the tracking… I don’t want the tracking.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Also check out bypass paywalls clean for firefox. since installing, I haven't seen a single paywall.
Archive.is is useful, for sure. Another option that I have used for a long time is BypassPaywalls. It works on Firefox, as well as Chromium based browsers. https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
I am a fan of that extension as well. There is a fork, sometimes one works better than the other https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
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
That's some real quick draw skill for a lot of people with good computers/phones and gigabit speed internet.
Hahaha you got me there! This little hack may be more feasible for those with shoddy xfinity internet like myself
Reader view in mobile Safari often works. As does switching to a private window. Failing that Google usually has a cache if archive.is doesn't.
Same in Firefox. And if you only get the preview in reader mode, refresh after you are in reader mode.
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.
uBlock Origin can do this too, there's a button that looks something like </> that will disable JS
load more comments
(1 replies)
That's nice to know. There's also "reader mode" built right into Firefox.
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.
Bypass Paywalls Chrome is also an option. It can be used in Chrome or Edge.
It's also available as a Firefox extension.
It's what I use on desktop.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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/
Or you can also use google translate
The paywall blocker in Unlock Origin is also quite efficient.
Great advice on archive, really smart work around
Here's another alternative, I save the article into Pocket and that usually works.
Or Wallabag, an open source alternative for those hearing about Pocket for the first time.
I’ll also add a real simple first step: view in incognito. So many sites will show full article if viewed in incognito it’s always worth a try.
In my experience that loophole has largely been closed. It used to work all the time for me, but these days rarely does.
Is there a way to save a post you like (like on reddit)?
I can't find anything on kbin, but lemmy has that feature. I can't wait for app support here.
Im on jerboa and you can save using the button right next to the downvote button.
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
load more comments
(3 replies)
If you use uBlock Origin there is an option to toggle JavaScript. This should be sufficient for most of the articles
Nice Tip.
view more: next ›