Most sites use simple cookies or a localStorage entry to limit how many articles you can read in a month. You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin:
I learned once of a quick workaround that's baffling - putting a dot at the end of the domain name (example.com/page becomes example.com./page)
Apparently this usually still resolves to the same page but the browser treats it as a different domain with separate cookies and localStorage, so it would bypass the limit, but if you kept doing it then it'd probably accumulate free articles still and stop working
That kind of bug happens under the "everything is a string" software paradigm. Abstractions that have more than one string representation inadvertently end up treated as different.
They are semantically different—one is a relative domain name, the other is distinct. I'm not sure how this impacts localstorage or cookies but it might.
The reason the trailing dot works is that it represents the implicit root DNS node. Browsers do the dumb thing and consider it a different domain, but AFAIK there's no good reason not to canonicalize the domain name.
All that to say, no, you sadly can't add another trailing dot.
I had never thought about having a local search domain so something like google.com.mynetwork. would resolve (the tailing dot prevents search domain lookups). Would a browser allow that internal site to access google.com cookies (since the lookup would be for google.com, no trailing dot). I suppose that would only work for unsecured traffic anyway so maybe not a huge attack vector.
Edit to add: if you have web services that are resolved via DNS, it may be a performance advantage to configure clients with the trailing dot. A lifetime ago we ran into intermittent latency issues when some DNS resolvers would try to search before checking the canonical entry.
That wouldn't work because Google would not return the proper content, since the host header would not match google.com. HTTPS would not work either, like you said, because the cert would not match the new domain.
If they didn't check host headers, then no, the browser would not send the cookies for google.com, since the browser has no idea about your DNS changes and is only looking at the domain name itself.
Like when the browser won't ever forget that you once visited an HSTS server at this domain and now+forever won't let you visit the http server (at the same domain).
There's a string you can type in blind that bypasses HSTS. Works on Chromium browsers. I don't want to make to too easy to find so I won't say it here but you can look for it.
You really think HN readers can't find the interstitial bypass keyword? It shows up in the very first Google search for it, I am not sure who you think you are protecting.
I also find it goes against the ethos of HN to try to prevent a user from controlling their own hardware... if I want to MITM myself, I should be able to.
I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot.
I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to.
But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all the $2.50 or $5.00 subs? I feel like we anchor to $10 because it's a nice easy number, but the average person just can't afford very many of these, and no single subscription is good enough. So we sustain our desire to not pay for anything.
Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform.
Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs.
EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.
> EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.
We've not already tried blockchain for this. The rails are there, just a small matter of implementation. Everyone's too busy building shovel factories and not enough people are mining for gold to make a web3 micropayments product.
I can, right now, buy $5 of solana on Coinbase, give you $0.05, with an inconsequential fee of $0.001 or so using Solana, and with enough $0.05 payments, you can cash it out via Coinbase. It works on web on desktop via a chrome extension, I'm still working out a solution for mobile.
I'd love to have an Internet reading budget for the month and have that automatically get disbursed to the writer if I read past a certain point in the article. The rails are all there, just a small matter of code and then getting adoption.
What would you say are the main barriers to adopting a solution like this more widely?
More technical points I can think of: how fast do transactions get confirmed (If they have to wait 5 min to read a news article most people will go somewhere else)? If this becomes more popular, what stops processing fees from going up (I think this is a problem for BTC).
Too many damn choices. Too many shovel builders leading to a paradox of choice. So many different wallets, so many different coins. The larger community is so utterly totally fractured. Which is by design, if I don't like what you're doing, instead of working together, I can take my ball and go do my own thing. Decentralization is great, except it's not. And then there's whole cryptocurrency angle. In order to buy into this, you have to buy some cryptocurrency. Maybe with something that's actually useful people won't automatically tune you out when you say "crypto" these days, but that always seemed like an uphill battle to me.
Anyway, Phantom*, with Solana can do micropayments today, on mobile and desktop, it's just a small matter of coding and adoption. Transactions take 5 seconds, which isn't awesome, but is stomachable. Gas fees are fixed at 0.00015 SOL, which then varies with the exchange rate, but that's currently (Jun 2024) $0.02. This does mean it will go up as the price of SOL goes up, but, well, it's not 2016, so I don't know that anyone's expecting wild swings in the exchange rate. I am not a cryptocurrency economist though. (Nor a regular one, for that matter.)
The supported golden happy path for this is anybody who can buy Solana, which would include a US person with a Coinbase account, who's willing to install their Chrome extension. The problem is mobile. The platform I'd like to support is Safari on iOS with a Safari extension, so it's seamless, but that's not there yet. What's there is to install a new app and use that app to browse, which I guess isn't the worst thing.
That's all technical implementation details though, the real barrier to adoption is getting writers/authors to use this. You'd have to setup a medium/substack clone, get a bunch of content producers on it, and then get readers will appear. But once you're there, then anyone else can setup a clone and cut you out of the picture. In fact, that's the whole point, that in using Solana as the base currency, people aren't tied into your platform. So then what's the incentive for setting up the medium/substack clone if the whole point of your clone is that people don't need it. So there's no VC-level funding to build this thing because there's no VC-level payout, but you're out there competing with well funded firms for talent to build this thing.
I've always thought (wished?) this was a killer app for crypto currency. I would love to have a pool of news "coins", that get auto spent on articles I choose to read. As the OP stated, I'd prefer to pay for content, but I dont have an infinite pool of $9.99-a-months..
I don't know what counts or doesn't count as a payment processor exactly in these states (GP brought that up, not me).
In any case, the tax status of a payment (donation or payment for goods/services received) would most likely be orthogonal to that, i.e. I don't think you could skirt any of these requirements just by saying you're taking donations.
The coupons could be on a cryptographic ledger so you have access to it from mobile/desktop/family members and any article could ask for payment from it or maybe different pricing for different sales funnel entry points. I think this is what Brave browser has set up, but I havnt been motivated enough to inquire.
I'm willing to sign up for some cheap subscriptions through Apple that I'd be unlikely to make directly because I don't have the energy to scrutinize individual vendors regarding hidden charges, dark patterns, data collection, security breaches, etc.
I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.
Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.
> Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)?
Money handling is expensive.
Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example.
As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.
> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.
Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges.
Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.
A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow.
Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per year means that you need roughly $100 each in profit in order to support that programmer. A thousand transactions in a month means you need roughly $10 profit each to support that programmer. You need 10K transactions per month before you are at $1 profit per transaction to support your programmer.
How many businesses have ten thousand transactions a month? Not very bloody many. Basically, only the very top 50 out of 250K creators (0.02%!) on Patreon pass that mark. It's REALLY rare.
Sure, when you are at scale things are cheap. However, before then things are very expensive.
in my experience, payment processors charge $.30 - $.50 + 2.X% per transaction (for credit cards). No other monthly fees required, though they'll gladly sell you some.
You definitely don't need an engineer dedicated to monetary transaction flows. We use Braintree and haven't had an engineer touch it more than once a year in the past 4 years.
if you want to go engineering free, shopify has subscription plugins that can handle everything for $20-$80/month...
I feel like your comment is from 10+ years ago, back before competition led to payment processors becoming a commodity... has it been a while since you've looked?
You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor.
And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer.
If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.
I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary.
This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.
Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$
The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested)
K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.
Bundle subscriptions would make a lot of sense. I'd pay $10/month to access "the news". I'm not going to pay $10/month to access 1% of the news. At the same time, $10/month is more money than the $0/month the news sites are getting from me right now.
This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...
It’s like cheap Canadian cellphone or internet plans - you have to wait until a news org offers a deal, then sign up for it. Managed to get cheap NYT and WSJ subs from it. You have to cancel when the price goes up and then accept the offer at cancellation to keep your low price for one more year, forever.
Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!
I feel very lucky that my local library has 'libby' an ebook reader that also has magazines and some papers - all for free. It is pretty nice to read a couple of magazines in the evening, as an alternative to 'just one more social media app...'
One can also disable Javascript for individual sites ("site settings").
Or use a client that does not implement cookies, localStorage or Javascript, like the original www browsers. I have been using these for decades.
In the relatively rare case I have to use a popular, graphical browser distributed by an entity that collects users' data to support online ad services, on a network I do not control, I use Javascript site settings and/or UBlock Origin. But that is far more complicated, more resource intensive and slower compared to using a simpler client and a localhost-bound forward proxy. Plus I am at the mercy of third parties: 1. the advertising-supported company distributing the browser and 2. the "browser extension" developer.
If I am reading HTML with hyperlinks, I use the "links" browser with some custom modifications.
Most times, I am making HTTP requests with TCP clients, not a browser. If I am using an HTTP client, I use tnftp with custom modifications, fetch, or some other small client I can easily modify. I use a localhost-bound TLS forward proxy. Thus I can use a wide assortment of old TCP and HTTP clients from years when software was less bloated. For example, I still use orginal netcat heavily on a daily basis.
When I retrieve HTML/JSON/CSV, I use small, simple UNIX filters I write myself to extract what I want and present it in a readable text-only format and/or insert it into a SQLite3 database. I like the sqlite3 text-only output formats.
Hitting a limit on the number of news articles I can read is not something I am personally familiar with, and I use the same news websites as the people who complain about this, hence I believe it is associated with the browsers they are using, not the websites.
Wow, yes, I would have joined. I dreamed of such a thing but also had a theory why it could never be.
Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues. Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction prefered by their owners. In the US, most small towns have newspapers owned by the leading families. The paper is valuable to that family if it's being read by the locals and the paper making money is nice but secondary.
Well, I wouldn't want to claim that every small town paper would keep going regardless of profits. Just that a fair number of considerations exist other than profit. Consider why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, for example.
That said, my small town's paper is going strong - it serves two cities of 12,000 and 3,000 people in a county of a little less than 100K.
It's worse than that. Your theory is probably true for BAD content. Newspapers that exist to spread lies or just opinions that favor some narrative are primarily driven to get as many eyes on their cheap propaganda as possible. The whole point of propaganda is to show it to as many people as possible.
GOOD content, though, is expensive to make, and while the creators would absolutely love it if everyone read it, their primary need is the ability to keep producing it. There are fewer billionaires paying to keep them in business, and if there were, they'd mostly likely start falling into being the bad kind of content.
So you end up in this situation where all of the true, high qualify information is behind paywalls, and all the bullshit propaganda masquerading as information is freely available to all.
When I ask older family members where they were or how they reacted when some important event happened, they usually say something like, busy with real life. Being glued to the news is a modern phenomenon, it’s not the required state of being
I stopped watching and reading the news, in general. I have some friends who balked at the idea when I mentioned it. They'd say, "Oh, but how do you keep up on important news?"
I don't.
My life is better for letting it go. If something is genuinely important, and I really need to know - I always end up finding out somehow.
I think a reasonable barometer for a lot of news is: will this be important or relevant in 1 month? If the answer is "no", then it's probably more entertainment than anything else.
However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news. For certain vulnerable groups, keeping up to date with politics and the news might have a tangible impact in their everyday life.
With that being said, I generally don't keep up with the news either.
> However if I were to try and steelman the opposition for your position, I'd probably explore the argument that you could be living a very privileged life which might be part of the reason for why you're able to ignore the news.
Well, the other issue is that people pay too much attention to national news and waaaay to little attention to local news.
That fracking site that just opened up next to your farm should probably occupy your attention. The four slobs trying to bring fiber to your town need your support. The fact that your local sheriff's office is swinging around with military gear might be a bit of a concern. etc.
Sure, you want to make sure you are paying attention to whether the fascists are trying to take over nationally, however, those same people can do a lot more direct damage to you by taking over local control.
Yes! And you can do a lot more about those local issues. The small-scale but impactful to _you_ actions are a more satisfying way to exercise democracy and a good way to build that muscle.
Slicing economically (oversimplifying here and ignoring other certain types of vulnerable or feeling-under-attack groups) the people at the bottom and the people at the top don't generally need to worry about the news. The ones at the top will be fine either way. The ones at the bottom will continue to have to scrap along either way. It's the people in the middle who's level of comfort day-to-day could be most affected by political changes, for whom a change in tax rate or inflation or social subsidies could shift comfort into precariousness or vice versa.
It is usually better to read about stuff like months later when the dust have settled. Watching CNN lazer focus on some "developing story" with almost nothing to talk about but gossip makes my head hurt.
If the local bridge is closed due to X people tell you.
Have you found a good place to read about slightly less current events? I feel like most articles are little salami slices of events as they occur, without context.
On paper there are some semimonthly environmentalist magazines my wife subscribe to, and the news coverage in those is quite settled and nice in that way. I guess magazines would be the place to look, but those seem to be dying off or are losing quality...
Real news has always traveled by word-of-mouth very rapidly. I am also trying to give it up— it’s definitely a difficult battle missing out on that dopamine fix (or whatever it is )— but I continue to struggle!
I don't read articles about autocrats or mass shootings or whatever because I don't enjoy them, and me reading them doesn't make the world a better place.
The public libraries in the USA that I'm familiar with have thousands of periodicals accessible on Libby. That's one way to slightly fund the authors of the essays and other features in those magazines.
Its so wild to me that the business models of newspapers and journalism in general just dont translate well to the web. Like I get that people expect content online to be free and the alternative sources of information are freely available but its just so tragic. There are so few journalists who do investigative journalism in countries that are smaller because the ad revenue just isnt there.
For example, there are a few youtubers who do a great job but their appeal is global - or at least the entire english speaking population. The scope of focus is “interesting conspiracies that are true” or “some product everyone wants”. Not a serious investigation into the misallocated funds in the local county.
The business model is journalism was advertising and it translated fine to the web. The problem is, it turned out that advertising didn't need journalism. Google ate the newspapers' lunch.
It was relevant, timely, legitimate geographically targeted advertising for most newspapers. The subscriptions fed the advertising, which fed the subscriptions, but subscription revenue was usually a tenth what advertising revenue was. Information for subscribers was collectively subsidized by businesses because they were in competition with each other and subscribers weren't.
Newspapers didn't understand that their own business model wasn't two separate modes of "journalism" and "advertising" until it was too late. They were always in the relevant information (both news and advertising) business, so Google SUPER ate their lunch. Many news organizations died and some limp along not knowing this, but the industry as a whole was fat and complacent. There was a lot of money in newspapers, especially before it was legal to own multiple news sources. Local newspapers being able to fly reporters to major national events type of money (in private jets for the larger ones).
I spent a few years at one of the larger surviving independent statewide papers in the US as part of a team specifically hired to "fix" the subscriber and advertiser losses. They told us the scope was business-wide, but in reality all leadership wanted was someone to tell them that they're smart, special people who just need to use manipulative tactics harder. Nonprofit and community focused papers are springing up, and doing well, but some old timers are holding out for something around the corner that will magically return them to 1000%+ profit margins instead of learning how to be a normal business since they missed their chance to be Google.
The business model was dual revenue streams: subscription (or a la carte day-by-day or month-by-month) + ad revenue, with a few exceptions like broadcast TV (where the coverage tended to be more shallow and lowest-common-denominator compared to the early days of cable TV news).
The online advertising merchants realized they could "curate" and "summarize" the articles, resulting in far fewer ad impressions than if someone had to find things purely through the publication newspaper, and bring the ads forward to their portal instead of solely on the content itself.
AND they capitalized on an early reluctance to charge for things online to push the "ew, who wants to pay" mindset globally.
(1) The web offers a plethora of choices, and one subscription doesn't cover that. Like, pre-internet if you wanted National Geographic-type info, you could only get that with a hard copy of National Geographic.
(2) People psychologically struggle with paying for something non tangible.
Is it surprising that the audience for "serious investigation into misallocated funds in local county" is extremely small? Is it really wild that you don't see this is a niche, that most people don't care enough to pay for someone to do that work?
It's not the web. It's democratization. And unfortunately, people would rather watch dancing cats then pay someone to tell them what their local county is doing. That's called consumer choice and fighting it is like fighting nature.
> Like I get that people expect content online to be free and the alternative sources of information are freely available but its just so tragic.
There is more to it than wanting free stuff. At least for some of us.
I have never subscribed to newspapers. If I wanted one, I would go to the convenience store or find a newspaper box. Why? Newspapers sold subscriber lists. I realized early on that online news sites would do the same, only they would have far more valuable data: they would know what interested me from what I read. So instead of being the target of advertising, I would be the target of targeted advertising.
(It also doesn't make sense from a convenience perspective. Newspaper subscriptions offered convenience through home delivery. News sites offer the, admittedly minor, inconvenience of managing accounts.)
It is a hard problem to solve for sure. But its definitely possible.
Like why not lay the smack down to all the illegal shit exposed by the panama papers, and put the money toward real investigative journalism outfits? Oh right because there are no consequences, and if there were they would never put the money in the right place.
You know, from the title I thought this was going to go for the funnier/darker angle of an automated system deciding the reader doesn't need any more free articles because the system has predicted they're going to die before the company gets any benefits from the ad impressions.
monetizing the web is something i don't bother thinking about getting solved. but how the parties go about the situation is always entertaining.
we are a technically skilled bunch and find ways around it. but is there a scope to inject advertizing into the "content" (i.e. the article) in a similar way youtube is experimenting with video (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660464)?
Fox News does have a article limit. It didn't ask for money, but it definitely wanted me to create an account to view an article. I was able to bypass with incognito browser.
The strange thing was, the article I read was almost verbatim to the one I had just read on CNN.
Maybe they both just copied from the AP? I dunno how these things work.
It is fun to compare how different news source report the same story.
Quality journalism, and, even more importantly, free journalism (as in neutral or unbiased), costs money. I think a subscription is a very low effort compared to the kind of risks and hard work top reporters go through.
Another angle: prose and code describe facts using slightly different languages, but would you say that code (or institutions capable of publishing code at scale) shouldn't exist or that they should "belong to people" (what does that mean anyway?)
Journalism does not cost money. Running a company that is attempting to profit off of publishing costs money. Or have you never read anything produced at no benefit to the author that has ever informed you? I think you're putting the cart before the horse, and advertising supported journalism has always existed, and these companies would rather collect CPM from google than do legitimate placement of ads in their own content, which would be unblockable.
No, what I'm saying is, the existence of institutions that can publish at scale has no impact on whether individuals can do it or not. I can write code whether Google exists or doesn't. In that sense it belongs to individuals.
the difference between new york times and a independent creator journalism is that the NYT can fund a huge legal department to defend free speech inside the court system. Its why the major free speech cases like NYT v Sullivan have the NYT in the name.
There is never, ever going to be an equivalent case with big tech ("Google V Sullivan") because Google does care what happens to youtube creators, and they are not liable because thanks to section 230 they are not a publisher. Google do not care if any youtuber get sued out of existence by the government or the powerful. Same for Wikipedia, Wikipedia is never going to be involved in a major free speech case because thanks to section 230 they have no legal liability for what others post on their site. Same for Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, all of them. Big Tech media has absolutely zero protections for any of the journalism done on them.
That is why big cases like Weinstein are still done by the NYT and The New Yorker.
If there was legal liability for user comments, this site right here couldn't host a comment section. And you'd have to use a publisher to complain about how hard it is to be a publisher
Sometimes it’s just not directly paid (most commonly: ad-supported journalism), or even paid for by the journalist with their time and opportunity cost of not selling it to somebody that does charge for it (blogs etc.)
If none of these are applicable, chances are it’s PR, not journalism.
Absolutely. Journalism takes time. Good journalism takes a lot of time.
I would agree that it takes very little time to parrot LEO/Gov/Corp press releases.
It takes much more time to vet that PR for accuracy, truthfulness and historical context - and then chase down all the rabbit holes that get turned up and compile enough info to craft an understandable story.
It does suck that the first option gets chosen like 100-1 over the 2nd.
* https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/
* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...