If you just want to be aware, you could often read the headlines for free or follow news sites like Reuters, AFP, or AP.
They are primarily wire news companies and are a great way to get reliable, truthful and often free news.
If you want to read longer articles, you should pay if you want to have articles to read in the future.
Back during prohibition in the US, there was a product called Vine-Glo that was a brick of grape concentrate. It came with a warning: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine."
Yeah the article stub doesn't link to the article. It links to a login flow with the article id. If you go directly to the article you get redirected if you don't have a session.
It's incredibly easy to make an impossible to get around paywall. Porn has done it since the Internet existed.
In this very particular situation I'm glad most companies are lazy and stupid.
I don't particularly care if a company does pay only content. I think its legitimately ok. I hate companies that don't make you pay enough for the service to cover their costs thus leading to complete enshitifaction.
It's incredibly easy to make an impossible to get around paywall.
Sure, but the easily-bypassed js method makes sure it’s still crawlable by search engines, which is a trade well worth making where I work. Doesn’t matter as much for porn sites since the title and description aren’t the content most people are there for, so you can expose them on the paywall page.
Brave browser has a filter to bypass paywalls. Works on desktop and mobile versions. Definitely works on NYT as I just read something there today. And of course has built in adblock. You can also add additional filters and adblock lists.
Bonus: print to PDF in Brave to share an article with someone else. It retains all the graphics relevant to the article and cuts all the junk and ads out too.
Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don't work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.
❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don't even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn't work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it's easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.
❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won't work on stub articles, and just janky because you're manually zapping things
❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don't have to be done with JavaScript.
❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you're trying to do a quick copy you're going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.
❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it's possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.
✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they're probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it's not depending on the full content being visible on the page.
✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you're signing yourself up for.
🤷♀️ Brave - It works, but, it's a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.
Firefox has a button that shows up in the url that kind of turns the webpage into an e-book-esque view that pops up for most articles (especially Pay Wall)
Javascript is overrated and more websites should be static with minimal interactive bs. But that's just me, a cynical user tired of intrusive pop-ups and predatory advertising scripts.
If a website sends all the data of an article to you, it's yours. They can't take it away. There's no basis to make the argument anything is owed to the website at that point.
Many sites don't work like that and don't even load the content from the server before the paywall check.
But I have a trick that work 100% of the time. Just don't read those sites.
I get that journalism and entertainment magazines have workers and need to be paid BUT:
They were getting paid when I could pay a cheap physical newspaper if I want to read it and usually had those for free anyway. As you'll get newspapers on most public places and one single newspaper would serve a whole family. In my house we didn't really paid more than 4€ a month and got physical things that you could just keep. Now with digital distribution you own nothing and it is far more expensive. So... No. Also they get a ton of public money through institutional advertisement, so I'm already basically paying for them without getting access to their content.
So unless they are willing to change their model I'll just refuse to read them. I'm happier without their clickbaits anyway.
we all need to consider, it costs money to fund quality journalism. we have to be aware of the many forces working against basic silly journalism, like what's happening at the school board.
Thank you for the great advice. We should share this to a maximum of people. We don't want people to get in trouble for violating copyright especially when done accidentally.
Came to say this. And they make mobile browsers. If I want to share a paywalled article with someone I just load it up in brave and print it to PDF then send them that. Works every time!
Brave browser has a filter to bypass paywalls. Works on desktop and mobile versions. Definitely works on NYT as I just read something there today. And of course has built in adblock. You can also add additional filters and adblock lists.
Bonus: print to PDF in Brave to share an article with someone else. It retains all the graphics relevant to the article and cuts all the junk and ads out too.
Independent journalism is dead because journalists need to be paid. And you guys celebrate this?
Yeah, sure, keep reading your "free" news. Just remember to ask yourself who do you think is paying for it and why.
Who? The biggest corporate entity without soul that is consuming our humanity and enacting a war on other corporations that continually escalate the destruction of our planet and the enshittening of all our work ultimately ending in total destruction of our happiness first and then our resources then our actual lives as the entity wins and is left alone controlling earth which was it's objective then it falls apart with not even a satisfactiory ding to mark its completion because nobody is left it it all over. I think it's that entity. Was I right?