- cross-posted to:
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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.
✅ Archive.is - works!
✅ 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.
Definitely don’t install the bypass paywalls clean extension or script so you don’t have to take a single manual action to get around them. That would be extremely contraversial!
brave has a filter you can add to auto-bypass paywalls already right there to be selected after install
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!
not NOT use firefox’ reading mode.
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.
Absolutely do not inspect elements and start deleting stuff! Leave them alone!
This must be like the disclaimer warnings on those “vine bricks” that were popular during Prohibition.
do not right click inspect element on the paywall window and then delete the code & re-enable scrolling (i always forget how to, but don’t google it)
the downside is that sometimes half the article is neutered anyway
Doesn’t NYT cut off most of the article now? I used to just be able to disable JS but that didn’t work anymore last I checked.
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.
For that to work you have to use Brave browser. Ewwww. Firefox does the same with add-ons.
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.
I thought the issue was they wanted search engines to be able to see the content, but not non paying viewers? Hence slightly shitty paywalls.
Eh you’re right of course. Like I said below. Search engines have become useless anyway…
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.
Maybe they have a way to unblock major search engine crawlers but block it for everyone else now? I know Cloudflare was doing something similar for some bot protection mechanism, and this seems like something news outlets would want to do also.
Very true. I don’t disagree at all. I think once google finally becomes totally useless. It won’t matter.
I mean Google is already just Yellow Pages AdWords edition with AI content
I use this extension and it lets me bypass pretty much every paywall including NYT’s
Best extension along with uBlock Origins!
Removed by mod
Least racist corporate shill
If you’re afraid of visiting Russian websites, piracy is probably not for you.
Russian websites aren’t the problem. Software from Russian websites potentially is.
What a bullshit argument. Oh yes, untrusted software from random sites in any other top-level domain is safe.
Removed by mod
If you insert yourself as a side of a war and also imply that people doing this should be on the front lines, then apparently you are?
And I don’t.
Shouldnt you be on the ukraine front lines with your fellow nazis?
And never, EVER disable JavaScript on that website and reload the page! Not even if your Ad blocker lets you selectively do it.
And God forbid if someone uses archiving sites like archive.is!
Truly awful. How will the news megacorp get its money? You wouldn’t steal the information required for you to be aware of world events? Right?
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.
Agreed
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excellent psa
I just use Bypass Paywalls Clean, or failing that, archive.vn.
Definitely don’t use uBlock Origin’s zapper mode to get rid of elements on the page that are blocking your view.
Disabling JavaScript through ublock origin also does the same (horrible) thing, frequently.
Then you just get an unblocked half an article
I’ve used ublock for years and only recently discovered the zapper and it’s my new favorite thing on the internet
I don’t generally use it, but safari got this baked in recently
I often forget YouTube shorts are a thing because i zapped them away.
You sir are a gentleman and a scholar, cheers for this
cocks the element zapper Say hello to my little friend!
On mobile Firefox, two right swipes in the middle of the screen closes zapper mode. It is not clear or obvious, but it works.
^ This person adblocks
I have been using inspect element to manually remove ads and other annoying things
Thanks for reminding me that i can just use ublock origin!
