News articles hidden behind a paywall shouldn't be allowed in news communities
News articles hidden behind a paywall shouldn't be allowed in news communities
Basically, if all I can read is a headline how can I consider it informative? A news headline has as much evidence as your average Tweet, and can be deeply incorrect through the use of clickbait.
I do use methods to get around paywalls, but knowing that some/most people won't, it seems counter-informative to solely use the clickbait headline to keep people informed.
Counterpoint: such articles should automatically be processed through https://archive.is when submitted and only accepted if successfully bypassed.
An even more unpopular opinion: we should pay for good journalism.
Where is the good journalism at? I’ll pay for it if it actually is good journalism.
Permanently Deleted
I agree with that, but am also limited to being able to afford just a few news subscriptions. Assuming I'm not the exception, it just seems to be counterproductive towards generating discussion in a community for discussing news.
People who can only view a clickbait headline also end up not knowing the context of what others are discussing that may have paid for the subscription, and could further be counterproductive in generating meaningful discussion.
Maybe the community should tag paywalled articles, such that those posts can be wholly filtered by users not wanting to see them?
Sounds like a popular opinion
This is an interesting take. What about a summary bot that can post article contents, cleaned up, from behind the wall?
Or: a bot that would post a web archive link, instead, to preserve privacy? Some instances take a similar approach to YouTube links by having a bot post Piped links.
This is not unpopular
Which techniques are out there to avoid the paywall?
Archive.ph is my go-to 😁
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I use the Bypass Paywalls addon in Firefox. That takes care of a lot of sites. Switching to reader view in Firefox can also get around some paywalls. Archiving sites can also be used to get around some paywalls.
Thx for the info mate 👍👍
12ft.io is good.
This is also what I tend to use
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If you use the Ublock Origin Extension, you can paste in custom filter lists that block the loading of paywalls I use this one.
To be fair, I don't actually know if the article has a paywall or not anymore since I started using Bypass Paywalls on Firefox.
It's really not hard to get around them, and paywalls differ geographically.
Using archive / bypass links as the post links make things worse: they allow shitty tabloid headlines to carry the same weight as those from legitimate sources by obfuscating the source. As most people only read the headline, it should be obvious why that's worse.
I hadn't considered the second part, but couldn't bundling the source with the bypass solve that issue?
Being that news communities are there to facilitate discussion, it seems counterproductive to keep people from viewing the article in question. If someone just wanted to read the headlines and not have any discussion, an RSS feed would probably be better.
I tend to get most of my news from https://ground.news these days.