I started to notice some people posting NYT, Bloomberg or other websites with hard paywalls, that leads to people in the comments that are unable to read the article to discuess the headline without any analysis and some times spreading misinformation, which cannot be countered by the article, due to the paywall.
Which bring me to this: Why does no one thought about blocking hard paywalled articles for the sake of quality of discussion?
Because it is the original data source which can be used to find non paywall archives using tools such as https://archive.ph/
I think it’s always good practice to link the original source.
Also nyt paywall can be easily bypassed with a ublock filter list
This is called a “velvet rope paywall”. The idea is to keep the content open to indexing while strongly encouraging human readers to cough up. It’s a decent idea IMO, as are (easily subverted) metered paywalls.
Why not block both as orginal links?
No paywalls or Archive links.
If you block data sources because you fear misinformation, then you also can’t discuss the misinformation/propaganda you disprove of. If you don’t allow that information to be posted, it is still being read by many many people that now have less chances of being informed about it being misinformation.
I don’t think limiting information is ever a good solution
Also, I agree with your reply on beehaw.
You can post third party source that discuess the orginal article and that way you can gurantee accessibility and almost full info.
The ad-supported internet is awful, and paywalls are sort of the only sane alternative. It’s how news has worked for centuries and we need to go back.
we need to go back
Right…
me secretly committing “piracy” by bypassing the paywall
AwkwardMonkey.jpg
(Paying for news, thats written by a corporation? In this economy?)
Because journalism costs money, and journalists have bills to pay. If you don’t want to pay money for news, some billionaire will happily pay it for you: https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo
Thank you. It really bothers me that there are so many people who expect journalism to fall from trees, or even that they’re somehow owed it.
The situation for the last 20 years - the internet free-for-all with plunging ad revenues and spotty quality - is a historic anomaly. Before that it was normal to pay for journalism, and masses of people did. Seems we’re slowly moving back to that model and it’s not a moment too soon.
That said, there have always been free sources of non-billionaire-controlled news in the form of state broadcasters like PBS, BBC, CBC. In mainland Europe there are several that publish in English, including DW, France24, Der Spiegel. They have their biases, of course, but they employ professional journalists who take their jobs seriously. And there are more and more nonprofit publishers too: ProPublica and The Guardian spring to mind but there are a ton of specialist outlets too, financed by readers or philanthropic foundations.
To be fair, state controlled (or state financed) media has its own set of problems, depending on the country and historic period, and things can change fast with certain governments.
Sure. But apparently subtle differences are in fact important. For example, RAI, the Italian broadcaster, is traditionally kept on a tight leash by the government, and everyone in Italy understands that. The BBC by contrast is almost completely independent due to its unusual setup involving a charter. PBS is partly accountable to its audience directly because it begs them for donations. Russian state TV is obviously just the propaganda arm of the Kremlin. Where the money comes from is important but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
For sure, but even the BBC has been under heavy criticism lately for some bias.
The BBC has always been under heavy criticism for bias, it’s inevitable given its role. But the point is that the bias is not structural: its journalists are not worried about losing their jobs if they offend the government or a billionaire owner. The BBC’s bias is the sum of the biases of the journalists, who tend to come from a certain section of society and see the world in certain predictable way. It’s quite hard to address that.
Time for “Journalism Dollars”? Similar to Democracy Dollars.
You get X amount of money that you can distribute to news sources however you choose, if you don’t do anything with it, it jist goes to PBS and NPR.
Vouchers, basically, as some countries (Sweden is one) do for schools. A pretty good idea IMO.
Are you suggesting that Propublica and The Guardian for example to have a hard paywalls?
Paywalls literally exist to support billionaires and their media empires.
Paywalls literally exist to support billionaires and their media empires.
Seriously? You may want to consider widening your news source, maybe.
I follow more than 300 news sources by RSS (all without paywalls), how wide you want me to go?
I follow more than 300 news sources by RSS (all without paywalls), how wide you want me to go?
I did not mean ‘widen’ in that sense—reading and being informed is not about the quantity of news one can swallow in a day, you know—but with the idea of reading different sources.
Also, may I ask how can you be reading three fucking hundred news sources regularly (not daily, obviously) with any sort of attention?
I did not mean ‘widen’ in that sense—reading and being informed is not about the quantity of news one can swallow in a day, you know—but with the idea of reading different sources.
I don’t know what are you digging into.
Also, may I ask how can you be reading three fucking hundred news sources regularly (not daily, obviously) with any sort of attention?
I read by hour, due to my free time(usually it does fetch 50 articles per hour, much less on holidays and I only read the interesting ones to me.)
It’s pretty perfect for me.
I don’t know what are you digging into.
Digging into?
I just say that reading news may be more enriching or, if you prefer, more useful when it’s not practiced like if it was a sausage eating contest.
You seem to enjoy eating a lot of news, that’s ok if that’s your thing, I’m only suggesting that eating less and more selectively could help you realize that all pay-walled content is not created for ‘enriching billionaires’, like you said earlier. Don’t get me wrong though, this is just a suggestion and you’re more than welcome to keep stuffing yourself with as much news as you fancy.
I read by hour, due to my free time(usually it does fetch 50 articles per hour, much less on holidays and I only read the interesting ones to me.)
50 articles per hour? That’s not reading, that’s scrolling. Which is perfectly fine, here again don’t get me wrong, but scrolling a list of titles does not equal reading them (aka, getting a clear idea of what the author wrote and then be able to summarize their argument reliably).
50 articles per hour means spending at most 1 minute and somewhere between 10 or 20 seconds to read each article (with enough attention to be able to understand what is read) and that’s only if one is using every single minute of that hour, not doing anything else like scratching one’s nose not even yawning out of exhaustion.
I’m impressed this is perfect for you, and glad you found a system that works wonders. It certainly would not be perfect for me. Even though I consider myself an intensive reader I’m also not much into stuffing myself like you may have understood already. Also, I do not worry much about people sharing links to pay-walled content since it rarely worries me when I can’t read one specific article.I don’t get your opinion.
I scroll in my feed for articles that interest me and ignore the others.
Example:
I am not interested into both articles, so I would ignore them till I find a interesting thing to read. How much time did it take for me here for 2 articles? 5 seconds max.
If I found a article that I am interested in, then I read it which would take anywhere between 5-20 mins.
Following less news sources, won’t benefit me at all.
Anyway, you seem to be focused on arguing without having any real argument to defend your opinion.
Why is that the problem of online discussion spaces? News sites can paywall their content, but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to allow paywalled links.
It doesn’t. Doesn’t mean anyone has to allow anything besides fox news either.
Just pointing out that journalism costs money and certain stories are very expensive to research and cover. As many things in life, you get what you pay for.
certain stories are very expensive to research and cover
Well a majority of the ones I see seem to rather be lazy garbage editorializing a single quote or study that would be more informative presented by itself.
As many things in life, you get what you pay for.
What I want is to talk about things with people who have also read the relevant context, news site paywall subscriptions prevent that even if you pay because everybody else will have only read the headline. Or they would, if they weren’t so easy to pirate.
You can apply the same for movies, games, theater plays, theme parks, travel… so you just don’t pay for anything just because you want to talk to someone about it?
If my primary interest in something is talking to people about it, then gatekeeping destroys its value to me. If my interest in a game is its multiplayer, but nobody plays it anymore, then yeah not only would I not pay for it I also would not spend the harddrive space to install it even if it were free.
Imagine you’re organizing a book club. Wouldn’t it make sense to require that prospective books to read are available through the library system? The nature of a book club is that you’ll have to read things you might not be interested in on your own, but it’s worth the effort because of the opportunity to share and gain perspectives of the other people there. Reading by itself is already an investment of time and effort, getting people to organize enough to have a discussion about something is already difficult, so the endeavor has a clear interest in avoiding the presence of an additional, financial, barrier to a successful discourse.
“You get what you pay for” doesn’t make sense here. The paywall makes it worthless for the given purpose whether or not you pay, which is why it would make sense for people administering link aggregator/discussion sites like this one to ban paywalled links.
So we shouldn’t have communities around videogames (or board games), professional sports, traveling, food, clothes, most hobbies, or anything else, because it costs money? Even in a bookbclub, the library won’t have 15 copies of the same book, some people will have to buy it, unless your book club comprises 2 people.
You get what you pay for is exactly right.
Even in a bookbclub, the library won’t have 15 copies of the same book, some people will have to buy it, unless your book club comprises 2 people.
IME this is not so much a problem because people are using ebooks and you can digitally check out books from other libraries than the one closest to you. If there is a lack of copies, that could be grounds for going with a different book.
So we shouldn’t have communities around videogames (or board games), professional sports, traveling, food, clothes, most hobbies, or anything else, because it costs money?
This is not at all what I’m saying. Does wanting to ban paywall links equate to wanting journalism to die? No, but it makes sense to do, and if it making sense to do conflicts with the business model, that’s not a moral problem because people aren’t obligated to help companies make their (imo stupid and harmful in this case) decisions work out for them.
We’re not in the mid-twentieth century. Journalism hasn’t been a thing for decades.
Lemmy is not a monolith, quite the opposite in fact.
Lemmy is a community of communities, and is all the better for it.
That’s a decision to be made by mods for their own communities.
FYI: Firefox has several plugins that can bypass paywalls. I haven’t encountered a link that hasn’t worked with the one I got (“Bypass Paywalls Clean”).
But they are not accessible to smart phone users.
That’s not true. I am using BPC on Fennec, Android.
What can the people who use Chrome or Firefox from the Play Store do to get it? They can’t.
I am pretty sure you can install BPC from file using both these alternatives.
Edit: Here is how.
Nope.
Also they say it clearly on their chrome repo that you can install it only using one specific browser, otherwise no.
jesus install Firefox then smh
I use BPC on Firefox mobile https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean?tab=readme-ov-file#android
One solution could be to use Kiwi Browser, can be installed from the Play Store and lets you use arbitrary Chrome extensions without hassle, I tested it and it can install BPC
I only use the plugin on the mobile version.
I prefer not to link to those, but I still think it’s important to link to the original source. Sometimes they’re the first to post about it and there’s not much way around it (until someone posts a link to an archive version that bypass the paywall, or someone provides an NYT gifted link, etc). So it’s either that or we lose the potential for discussion.
There’s a community for gifted link articles to NYT right there: [email protected]
That’s up to the specific community on that specific instance.
I had never seen a single community that apply that. There might be a one that I did not notice, but otherwise there is not a single community that has any rules about this.
I’ve definitely encountered it. I think it was in an ADHD community. I linked an unpaywalled article, plus the paywalled journal article that the first article was based on, and they asked me to remove the paywalled journal link.
Many of the articles from those platforms are useless noise, but I do still occasionally want to read something that’s posted. When that happens, I just F12 and bypass the paywall, or look for the comment that has the article text, from someone else who has already done that.
or go to archive.ph and check to see if they have the de-paywalled version
A paywall for journalism is just as legitimate as a paywall for any other kind of product or service that costs money to produce.
Suggested compromise: keep the original link (this helps the publisher) and include a relevant excerpt from the paywalled article - not the whole article, but enough to allow an informed discussion on it. Encourage readers to subscribe if they can afford it. Most publishers will be happy with that.
Sure but we don’t link to paywalled services do we.
Which bring me to this: Why does no one thought about blocking hard paywalled articles for the sake of quality of discussion?
Why block (aka, censor) a link?
- People are free to subscribe if they want to, they at least get a link to the source.
- People can often find workarounds if they can’t/refuse to pay but they would still need the link to know what exact ref they should search for.
Each community has it’s own rules.
Many of us have access to pay walled media, so why block it for everyone?
Reverse the question, many of us don’t have access to pay walled media, so why post it?
As it’s been pointed out several times in this thread, there are ways around that.
Not posting pay walled content Ignore it for everyone, even people having access to it
Posting it people without access can still follow the discussion, and some are quite important news
Because for 99% of the users it’s useless inaccessible spam.
nothing at all is universally “blocked on Lemmy”, different instances + communities set rules that apply there, that is kinda the point of it all…
If you think this is a good idea for a specific community, ask its moderators to create and enforce a rule for this, or create a community of your own where you can set any rules you like.
I don’t want moderators to have that power. I do think that users should be able to block posts that link to domains.
filteReddit, a component of Reddit Enhancement Suite, had domain blocks. I’m eagerly awaiting an equivalent to disenshittify Lemmy of paywalled bullshit.
Agreed. Mods should be straight up removing posts from people who post pay walled links. I might go as far as to say they should even be banned. Absolute zero tolerance with this bullshit.
Exit: judging from the comments it appears people like paywalled content? Rip.
It isn’t that people like paywalled content, it is that people don’t like blanket rules for a decentralized system like the fediverse.
It would be up to mods of different communities to implement those rules. I rather have some common sense rules vs. a free for all where Lemmy is full of paywalled content, trolls, and AI garbage. Are you saying you’d like Lemmy to be trash?
Paywalled content is still useful for some users who either bypass the paywall or are already paying for it, so a blanket rule that bans it would be limiting what could be discussed.
What does paywalls have to do with trolls and AI garbage? That some communities allow it (and others don’t)? I’m fine with some communities having that trash, because I can easily ignore it.
What you want is centralized rules that apply to all of lemmy but somehow voluntarily?
I’m not sure what you’re saying. I’m saying that individual communities should have rules against paywalled content, depending on what the community is. Many should have blanket rules against paywalls since a vast majority cannot access them.
You sounded like you didn’t want any rules whatsoever so that’s why i asked about trolls and garbage. You either moderate a community or you don’t.
You sounded like you didn’t want any rules whatsoever
Where did I say that?
Not wanting blanket rules for all communities doesn’t mean not wanting any rules.
Banning anyone who posts inaccessible shit isn’t a blanket rule, it’s mere common sense.
If it’s inaccessible it’s spam, and spam is intolerable by definition.
But it isn’t inaccessible for a lot of people, who either pay for it or bypass the filter.
Not everyone owns every video game. Should we ban discussion on video games?
