Counterpoint: such articles should automatically be processed through https://archive.is when submitted and only accepted if successfully bypassed.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
271 points (92.7% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
6323 readers
30 users here now
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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 😁
👍👍
12ft.io is good.
This is also what I tend to use
👍👍
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 👍👍
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 always prefer the archive link in the post body. That way you have the benefit of it if you need it, and the source for the headline is prominently displayed close by.
With the archive link posted in the body, that's not really a paywall anymore. I do appreciate you doing that though!