more and more news sites are pushing for paywalls even reuters now here are some sources that don't have pay walls and Npr *mentions* paywall in their own new pop-up?

rob299@lemmy.worldbanned from sitebanned from site to Technology@lemmy.world – 220 points –

also feel free to comment your own suggestions for news sites for tech updates that don't pay wall on the web page.

New York times - https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology abc - https://abcnews.go.com/technology

the hill - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/ BBC news - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology

while nonprofit Npr doesn't pay wall, they have a new pop up that says something along the likes of "expected a paywall not our style please donate" that the user can dismiss and continue browsing the site. https://www.npr.org/sections/technology/

Reuters use to be a good source for me untill they started pay walling after a small amount of news article reads.

69

Holy punctuation Batman!

thanks I thought that my English was getting even worse

More and more news sites are implementing paywalls, and even Reuters has joined the trend. Here are some sources that do not have paywalls

I guess

more and more news sites are pushing for paywalls even reuters now here are some sources that don't have pay walls and Npr mentions paywall in their own new pop-up?

Have you got a paywall on fuckin punctuation mate 😂

I'm ok with scrolling past ads if they don't obstruct my user experience. But if they pop up and move the page around, I'm out.

I think that's the main reason many people have add blockers... Everything is either invasive or being used to track us to generate more clickbait that shove even more ads into our faces.

Pop ups are annoying on a traditional computer, but on touch interface devices they are pure evil.

I have an adblocker because I don't want to see any ads and these businesses are profitable whether I use one or not. Even if they aren't charging for paywalls.

It's about maximizing profit, not keeping the lights on.

Reuters just asks for a sign up which is annoying but at least it’s free

true, but i'm not signing up for something I check once in a blue moon. and I suppose technically it isn't a paywall, but it could turn into to one, or it might as well be one, what else does this pop up serve, to protect the site from bots?

It’s still free to you. It’s not a paywall.

Mind you, you’re not contributing at all to support the material you’re consuming — there are other humans trying to make a living off the stuff you want for free.

Support things you value, otherwise they might disappear. Or worse, they introduce a true paywall.

Reuters is a bit different as a newswire, though. Their main customers are other news outlets.

That’s fair.

Maybe Reuters is finding that “end users” are becoming their new customers, especially in the current media climate.

At first blush, I think it’s ok to want to track that type of impact more.

I'd argue that it is a paywall—you're just paying in data rather than currency.

(A lot of these can be bypassed, with varying amounts of inconvenience, by deactivating Javascript for that site.)

Advertisements can be blocked or allowed. But my issue is with the secret tracking that goes on on most websites i encounter. I am willing to support good journalism, but i'm not willing to have my privacy invaded. Unfortunately, it is hard to separate them, because am i donating for good journalism, but also encouraging the tracking? When i donate, will they stop tracking me? Probably not.

I don't want to comment on entitlement because we're not all in the same place financially.

However it IS important to support good journalism and some nicer models are funding through taxes (public broadcasters) or subscriptions. Subscriptions aren't necessarily individual, and some are for through local libraries and universities.

Good journalism costs money, and it's one of the only things that give us a fighting chance towards fixing the problems around us. If news agencies run out of funding, then they switch to other models, or worse they get sold to some corporation and the coverage is controlled.

What you can do, depending on where you are in life:

  • financially: pay for subscriptions, or donate what is reasonable
  • whitelist advertisements on good sites
  • advocate for public funding and pooled subscriptions

Piracy / filter blockers will be around, so if all else fails just read the stories to learn and grow as a person. You can contribute and advocate someday

whitelist advertisements on good sites

Stupid question, but does that generate any benefit for the platform even if you don't click the ads?

Even if I see an ad for something I'm interested in, I'll act on that by looking the item in question up on a search engine or YouTube or something - never by clicking the ad, as that's always felt like risky browsing behavior in terms of opening the doors to malware.

Fair question, I think it depends

Sites also have control over the types of ads they show, so sites with harmful ads should be blocked anyways

No one source is useful in a vacuum: you need to Investigate and Interrogate all media to form a clearer picture. So if I gotta shell out 100s of dollars to get that... well I'm just gonna disconnect entirely.

The Internet: "If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer." The Internet: "Ads suck! We're going to block them."

Content Providers: "OK, we're going to charge to pay for our bills then."

The Internet: "HOW DARE YOU?"

I like to say long run-on sentences like it's a bad English dub over really old Japanese animation. Then I downvote.

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

I've tried quite a few Unpaywall versions of add-ons before and never had too much luck.

I suppose I'll add another to the try list lol.

This one works very well. Of course it depends on the website but it supports a lot of them, including a lot of local and non English sites. I use it for a long time now, back then it was even still on the official addon store.

I can't read Reuters links on my mobile because they keep demanding I provide my email. I can still view Reuters articles on my desktop without providing email. I'm not sure why it works on desktop and not on mobile. I refuse to link Reuters articles to Lemmy now.

Refuse my man... anyway the reason between the platform wonkiness is their target demo are normies using phones. So avoiding the restriction on PC is just them not coding it to be restricted on PC platform.

Many such cases. Normies love their mobile doom scrolling lives

dw.com

seems interesting, a news source from Germany. I'l bookmark it and check it out.

I really don't mind paying for good commentary and objective news, not corporate propaganda. Instead I seek foreign and objective independent sources that provide real information to temper the MSM noise.

As if I care :). The web is wide. I can wait whilst reading something else more usefull or waisting my time elsewhere, till all those newly paywall'ed (or accountwalled just to read) sites would want me (and other lost users) back and get rid of their paywalls.

as you say this big companies in recent times have been working on making the web less wide, and less accessible mostly for independent sites. search engines hide sites, sometimes Playstore will take down apps. I think this is a small issue slowly turning into a big issue. and a small handful that own a bunch of the sites you commonly see will take advantage of the changing landscape.

If content providers and content sindication web companies will become profitable, that means other companies will want a pie too and the new web sites will start to appear. Also, it means that there is a profitable niche in this particular kind of content type trafic. And so, anyone can start a website with that content small and try to grow. The more paywalls on old established ones, the better the chances of the new ones, (or for unpaywaled again, old ones) replacing them.

Because you people refuse to pay. It's an absurd amount of entitlement.

You bitch incessantly about ads but refuse to pay 🤦‍♂️

Modern advertising is worth bitching about whether you’re willing to pay or not.

Nah. It's entitlement.

Ads are invasive, intrusive, and hardly actually worth the value they sell themselves for… but I guess I’m entitled for thinking so.

Then pay.

That sounds like mafia logic. Paying won’t make ads any less intrusive or invasive. Only a little less so, only for me, only on one specific website, and only until advertising gets reintroduced to that service’s paid tiers. Modern advertising is its own reason why ad-blockers are so popular. It isn’t entitlement, it’s a response to entitlement.

The problem isn't that I refuse to pay. The problem is that I don't want to pay everyone.

Newspapers need a payment mechanism where users can pay once and get access to a range of papers, not just one. People are cutting things like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, etc because they don't want to pay for all of these services. I shouldn't be required to have a subscription to NYT, WashPo, Los Angeles Times, the local news paper, just so I can click on any link.

If they can figure out a way to make this easy for users, they will have more money than they know what to do with.

The reason adblock and paywall bypassers are so popular right now is because newspaper businesses are working like streaming companies and refusing to work together. But they don't have the exclusive on news like Paramount does on Star Trek or Prime does on The Expanse.

So a link to a news story can come from anywhere and users have voted with their wallets. If they aren't going to make it easy to subscribe to everyone, we'll just bypass the paywall.

Personally, I remove about ads incessantly because they're not just ads anymore nowadays.

They serve double-duty as trackers, and with how easy it is for malicious actors to hijack them (and ad businesses like Google evidently not giving a fuck), they're a genuine security concern, too.

If ads were just ads, then I'd be fine with them. But their current state is just... bad.

Correct. The level of entitlement I've seen here on Lemmy is generally astonishing.

These companies have dozens of members of staff who absolutely deserve to be paid for their work. They're not allowed to run ads, they're not allowed to ask to be paid, what the fuck else are they supposed to do?

Fuck, even for YouTube - if you use the service, either pay, watch ads, or just don't use the service at all. It's not that hard.

I get it but if the work is to generate an unreadable article made by chatGPT then no thank you. Albeit they may generate using chatGPT because they're paid peanuts and just wanna go home🫤

I'm an avid reader and listener of NPR (and I do support my local station - fingers crossed we'll get the NPR+ bundle soon), and I have yet to see any article that even remotely seemed to be written by an AI.

What do we do in this case?

Thanks for the reminder about NPR+. I need to email my station to get rolled into it.

It's great stuff, but I don't like having to support individual shows - I want to just get the bundle and support all the big ones. :/ So bizarre that it's not available in every state.

Hopefully they roll the bundle out soon nationwide. I was kinda surprised to see my small town station already supported.

We refuse to pay for something that is already profitable?

What happens when we all subscribe and they decide to raise the price 'just because'?

Don't be a useful idiot.

5 more...

Why do so many people on this site hate paying for anything? You're not entitled to everything for free.

Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you've built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you've caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.

Because smart people don't pay for things they can get for free if they're already profitable.

Useful idiots do, and they're proud of it.

So if all the "useful idiots" became enlightened like yourself. Who would pay for journalism, movies, games, server farms, food, etc to be produced and function?

if they’re already profitable.

Products would still get made, there would just be less profit.

So if all the “useful idiots” became enlightened like yourself.

Don't worry, they won't. :)