Current Events > At what point did pay walls become a thing

(+) Yeah! (+)

You can't even read a short article without having to pay. I know it's a way to bypass these articles (or simply find the article elsewhere), but it's annoying that 90% of the articles you try to read are behind some pay wall.

Since companies found out there are plenty of people gullible enough to actually pay for it.

I think the only paywall worth paying is your local newspaper. But I dont even do that. Any article with a paywall just lost a click

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234
If Google can see the full content, you can too.

Questionmarktarius posted...

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234
If Google can see the full content, you can too.

ooh, tag.

What sucks is that most of the reputable news sites are paywalling their information, leaving the regular user to see out free sources that also happen to have far-right biases.

Solar_Crimson posted...

What sucks is that most of the reputable news sites are paywalling their information, leaving the regular user to see out free sources that also happen to have far-right biases.

Somewhat ironic that the left demands payment, yet the right does not.

Questionmarktarius posted...

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234
If Google can see the full content, you can too.

Exactly what I need.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I can't think of a reason it would be worth paying to read an article

Questionmarktarius posted...

Somewhat ironic that the left demands payment, yet the right does not.

The right are funded by the capitalist class since they're business-friendly. Same reason why capitalism and fascism go hand-in-hand given enough time.

Pay walls became a thing the instant news sites realized that was a thing they could do.

CableZL posted...

I can't think of a reason it would be worth paying to read an article

Buying an actual paper issue of a magazine, journal, or newspaper
I pay fucking Gamestop $20 a year just to get Game Informer in the mail, and its been terrible for years. Maybe I should stop doing that.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Buying an actual paper issue of a magazine, journal, or newspaper
I pay fucking Gamestop $20 a year just to get Game Informer in the mail, and its been terrible for years. Maybe I should stop doing that.

Yeah, I haven't actually paid for a magazine in so long. Maybe that's the problem.

But when I did pay for magazines, it was generally because they also had demo discs or something.

CableZL posted...

I can't think of a reason it would be worth paying to read an article

Because legitimate journalism and research requires funding. By using free sites you are more likely to run into propaganda

Hinakuluiau posted...

Because legitimate journalism and research requires funding. By using free sites you are more likely to run into propaganda

Fair point.

Hinakuluiau posted...

Because legitimate journalism and research requires funding.

When the internet advertising model becomes not a shitpile of surveillance and malware, maybe.
https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/category/adtech/

Or I guess this was the opposite of your point. Damn.

Didn't it start with premium rate phone numbers?

When people stopped buying newspapers.

Right click > view page source > dig through HTML and the entire article is there in plaintext > copy-paste in any software that adds word wrap for you.

bigblu89 posted...

When people stopped buying newspapers.

When absolutely everything on the internet was either free, or behind trivially-defeated paywalls.
https://news.google.com

At one point, Spain tried to charge money for Spanish news sites to appear on google news. Google simply delisted all of them, and site views and thus ad revenue collapsed to near zero instantly.