Were you paid to write this comment? If not, then your statement is either true (and therefore slop), or false (because what made the early web awesome was people like you putting their thoughts online... for free).
Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded?
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site.
If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites.
I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.
Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?
> If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites
Except it doesn't work with links, which is usually how I find news stories. I have Apple One (which includes News), but If I click on a link to the WSJ, I get the paywall. To read the article, I have to copy the article title or headline (if I can find it!), and paste it into the News app to read it.
I would like paywalls, but only if they had been extremely different from the current paywalls.
First, I almost never find subscriptions acceptable, but I would happily pay for downloading anything that I am interested in, after seeing a preview that would convince me that the content is worth it.
Second, the procedure for paying would have to be very simple and more importantly, the prices would have to be very low, e.g in most cases not significantly bigger than $1.
I can easily read many hundreds of articles per month, or even per day. A price of e.g. $30 per article is not feasible, except in very rare occasions, for something unusually valuable. In most cases even $10 would be too much for a single article.
I actually subscribe to a few paywalled libraries, but I frequently prefer to take the content that I am paying for from some pirate sites, because those have much faster content searching and instant downloading, while if I go on the sites for which I pay dearly, I waste a lot of time with inferior searching and especially with various slow and annoying steps for authorization.
I understood that ads paid for newspapers. The nominal fee they charged was probably for pulp and barrels of ink. (If the papers were completely free people would just grab armloads to line their bird cages.)
When the physical paper is gone and delivery is over the wire, free should in fact be doable.
Perhaps the local news fucked up by accepting Google ads. Had each regional, metropolitan area put together their own ad agency they could have served up local ads and likely kept something closer to their previous business model—likely reaped more dosh?
Even netflix suffers from this, for a while they were great, pay them watch anything. but then the traditional publishing houses started cutting their works off from netflix in favor of running their own streaming. which had two results, a balkanization of streaming video (you can't just go to one place anymore) and netflix investing into making their own content so they have something to stream.
You can copy/paste (or share to, if you set that up) what is visible before the paywall into Perplexity or similar service to see if the article is syndicated elsewhere paywall free, or find similar sources, e.g. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/apple-privately-threatened-...
If you have Apple news you can share to that in a similar way.
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e
Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
It functions fine in many countries though. E.g. a lot of European countries have public broadcasters paid by tax money and they sure do criticize and mock government.
Commercial broadcasters tend to lean towards entertainment (needs ad revenue), so news becomes entertainment too.
It works as long as the state and public believes in democracy, accountability, etc. It’s very vulnerable, but everything in democracy is. Democracy and free press can only work if the population also defends it, which is what is failing in the US. The majority of population does not want to defend democracy.
So my point is invalid that you shouldn’t depend on government funding of media because if the government doesn’t like what you say they will remove funding when that’s exactly what they did?
But I think the hard on for PBS that conservatives have is that PBS admitted gay people exist.
Back in the 60s PBS was controversial partially because it showed black and white kids playing together on Sesane Street…
Well it worked for 80 years it seems and now that the USA does not have a democratically acting government anymore they want to get rid of the funding.
Press that does not need to be profitable is extremely valuable to a democracy as it can openly talk about any issues without a conflict of interest.
Good democracies have that funding and no meddling of politicians with the content enshrined in their constitution.
So exactly when was the US a “good democracy”? 80 years ago segregation was still in the South based on a ruling by the Supreme Court “separate but equal”.
Even until the 80s it was legal to arrest a homosexual couple for having sex in their own home based on “sodomy” laws.
Today women are dying because doctors are afraid of performing medical necessary abortions to save their lives because they might go to jail
They have been trying to get rid of funding since at least 1969 when Mr. Rogers himself went before Congress to try to keep it.
Let's be clear that Democrats support democracy and the democratic process. Republicans support oligarchy and a new gilded age of robber barons.
If government actually funded news in the public interest, it would mean that Democrats were in charge. Sure, Republicans could always cut funding or pressure publicly funded news if they returned to power. It would be our job to make sure that didn't happen. Publicly funded media can't work under corrupt Republican administration.
But, it's also true that commercial media is being bent under pressure from the Trump administration. Republicans will try to break anything which they perceive as limiting their power. Your narrow focus on publicly funded media seems to miss that big picture.
Democrats don’t support “wrong speak” any more than Republicans - it’s just a different type of wrong speak. I a socially liberal Black guy who supports almost every type of equal rights imaginable would immediately get cancelled and liberals would try to de platform me once I speak out against the one bridge too far for me - biological men in women’s sports or other women only competitions.
Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.
In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid.
Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming.
Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
Because somebody else is paying them? Public funding, indvidual donations, corporate and non-profit sponsorship all come immediately to mind.
Commercial journalism could also be funded with profits from other lines of business. While shareholders might revolt if Disney started streaming World News Tonight ad and subscription free, Michael Bloomberg could remove Bloomberg News paywalls with a phone call.
Twitter is already a bit of a special case because porn is so accessible (although, you must opt in through the browser and cannot opt in through the app).
Discord works the same way I think, so I'm not sure Twitter is special in that regard (there exist a myriad of porn servers on discord, and the company is constantly getting in hot water because of its popularity among kids/teenagers).
Maybe—I don't think anyone is choosing between the two based on access to grok of all things. I think it's simply treated as an extension of twitter, which will almost certainly never be forced out while it remains the premier app for diplomacy and AI porn.
Yeah, Apple doesn't care about losing money or pissing off a large user-base. They assume they have enough money and they'll always have the larger user-base.
It has a massive user base. And political connections. And lawsuit money. Apple (and Google) will absolutely treat these publishers differently than a random app developer.
You'd think Apple would go after the top-charting apps that are leveraging the scam companies (like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire) for actively engaging with scams like this to pump their own numbers up...
(https://old.reddit.com/r/FreeCash/comments/1i4132r/monopoly_... - like this. What the everloving hell? Straight up enticing users to shove themselves into a game, expose themselves to ads galore, and then keep goading them into blowing even more money in the partner app under the guise of 'real cash'.)
So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s sad. It never occurred to me we’d get here.
Why is it sad for people to be compensated for their work?
That's not what OP said.
Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls.
Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
The web is still open, anyone can post anything they want and anyone can see it (in the US, at least).
An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.
The original message is,
> So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s lamenting that more is behind paywalls. Not that the paywalls exist.
And sowbug wrote that paywalls and the open web are not compatible, to which I disagreed.
People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.
Were you paid to write this comment? If not, then your statement is either true (and therefore slop), or false (because what made the early web awesome was people like you putting their thoughts online... for free).
Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded?
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
Please don't use strawman arguments. It's immature.
This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site.
If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites.
I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.
People demand access to everything.
We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
And CBS might as well be state controlled media and ABC just bribed Trump and very much kowtows to the administration.
Advertisers are moving away from broadcast along with eyeballs.
With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.
Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?
Advertising doesn't cover the bills anymore/ever.
> If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites
Isn’t this exactly what Apple News[1] is?
—
[1] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
Except it doesn't work with links, which is usually how I find news stories. I have Apple One (which includes News), but If I click on a link to the WSJ, I get the paywall. To read the article, I have to copy the article title or headline (if I can find it!), and paste it into the News app to read it.
Use the share menu and select the News app and it’ll open the story in it. Not as easy as those app banners but still not too difficult.
TIL, thanks for the tip!
Thanks. I never would have thought to do that - the News app wasn't even one of the default targets for me.
It serves ads even if you pay, so for me, no.
The ads are less intrusive than paid subscriptions from the providers IMO. Not a fan of the double-dip either though.
…which makes it no different practically every other form of periodical news media that’s ever existed.
Apparently they can be blocked (mitigated?) with PiHole. But your point stands.
Isn’t this true for Netflix as well?
I'd rather have paywalls than the privacy shit storm ads on the internet brought us. Paying for content is totally fine.
You paid to read a book. You paid for the paper. You paid to see a movie. Yeah they had/have ads but not ones that retarget and manipulate you.
Think of how much more sane the world would be if you had to pay for Instagram and Facebook.
I say bring on the paywall.
I would like paywalls, but only if they had been extremely different from the current paywalls.
First, I almost never find subscriptions acceptable, but I would happily pay for downloading anything that I am interested in, after seeing a preview that would convince me that the content is worth it.
Second, the procedure for paying would have to be very simple and more importantly, the prices would have to be very low, e.g in most cases not significantly bigger than $1.
I can easily read many hundreds of articles per month, or even per day. A price of e.g. $30 per article is not feasible, except in very rare occasions, for something unusually valuable. In most cases even $10 would be too much for a single article.
I actually subscribe to a few paywalled libraries, but I frequently prefer to take the content that I am paying for from some pirate sites, because those have much faster content searching and instant downloading, while if I go on the sites for which I pay dearly, I waste a lot of time with inferior searching and especially with various slow and annoying steps for authorization.
But you didn't pay for ten books just to check a couple of pages in each!
It forces you to decide what's important to you.
I understood that ads paid for newspapers. The nominal fee they charged was probably for pulp and barrels of ink. (If the papers were completely free people would just grab armloads to line their bird cages.)
When the physical paper is gone and delivery is over the wire, free should in fact be doable.
Perhaps the local news fucked up by accepting Google ads. Had each regional, metropolitan area put together their own ad agency they could have served up local ads and likely kept something closer to their previous business model—likely reaped more dosh?
Even netflix suffers from this, for a while they were great, pay them watch anything. but then the traditional publishing houses started cutting their works off from netflix in favor of running their own streaming. which had two results, a balkanization of streaming video (you can't just go to one place anymore) and netflix investing into making their own content so they have something to stream.
You can copy/paste (or share to, if you set that up) what is visible before the paywall into Perplexity or similar service to see if the article is syndicated elsewhere paywall free, or find similar sources, e.g. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/apple-privately-threatened-...
If you have Apple news you can share to that in a similar way.
It costs money to pay journalists.
You get that money through advertising or subscription revenue.
Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock. You couldn't adblock TV or a physical newspaper.
Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. Anyone that isn't the New York Times is struggling.
> It never occurred to me we’d get here.
My parents were journalists. The business model has been broken before I could read.
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
Not mentioned is taxes.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...
And in Australia most of that money went to Murdoch controlled media.
I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
Republicans have been trying to cut funding for PBS.
What’s your point? A press funded by the government is not going to go out of its way to bite the hand that feeds it.
It functions fine in many countries though. E.g. a lot of European countries have public broadcasters paid by tax money and they sure do criticize and mock government.
Commercial broadcasters tend to lean towards entertainment (needs ad revenue), so news becomes entertainment too.
It works as long as the state and public believes in democracy, accountability, etc. It’s very vulnerable, but everything in democracy is. Democracy and free press can only work if the population also defends it, which is what is failing in the US. The majority of population does not want to defend democracy.
Huh? You mentioned yourself that PBS and NPR did. So that proves your point invalid.
So my point is invalid that you shouldn’t depend on government funding of media because if the government doesn’t like what you say they will remove funding when that’s exactly what they did?
But I think the hard on for PBS that conservatives have is that PBS admitted gay people exist.
Back in the 60s PBS was controversial partially because it showed black and white kids playing together on Sesane Street…
Well it worked for 80 years it seems and now that the USA does not have a democratically acting government anymore they want to get rid of the funding.
Press that does not need to be profitable is extremely valuable to a democracy as it can openly talk about any issues without a conflict of interest.
Good democracies have that funding and no meddling of politicians with the content enshrined in their constitution.
So exactly when was the US a “good democracy”? 80 years ago segregation was still in the South based on a ruling by the Supreme Court “separate but equal”.
Even until the 80s it was legal to arrest a homosexual couple for having sex in their own home based on “sodomy” laws.
Today women are dying because doctors are afraid of performing medical necessary abortions to save their lives because they might go to jail
They have been trying to get rid of funding since at least 1969 when Mr. Rogers himself went before Congress to try to keep it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA
It amazes me that anyone who knows anything about this country actually wants to give it more control of the media or any increased power .
Let's be clear that Democrats support democracy and the democratic process. Republicans support oligarchy and a new gilded age of robber barons.
If government actually funded news in the public interest, it would mean that Democrats were in charge. Sure, Republicans could always cut funding or pressure publicly funded news if they returned to power. It would be our job to make sure that didn't happen. Publicly funded media can't work under corrupt Republican administration.
But, it's also true that commercial media is being bent under pressure from the Trump administration. Republicans will try to break anything which they perceive as limiting their power. Your narrow focus on publicly funded media seems to miss that big picture.
Democrats don’t support “wrong speak” any more than Republicans - it’s just a different type of wrong speak. I a socially liberal Black guy who supports almost every type of equal rights imaginable would immediately get cancelled and liberals would try to de platform me once I speak out against the one bridge too far for me - biological men in women’s sports or other women only competitions.
> Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock.
Not even remotely. Meta made $200 billion in ad revenue last year. NYT ad revenue increasing 25% yoy and they show ads to subscribers.
Those poor souls who don't have an adblocker keep the wheel spinning. I imagine it to be terrible to see the internet like they do...
Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.
In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid.
Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming.
Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
But you weren't a journalist trying to earn a living.
So, social media is your news source, same as it is today?
I don't think "not everything is about money" is meant for taking freebies or employing people without paying.
Either pay or watch ads, which is it?
> Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
Perhaps some journalists have made the exact same argument to their landlords and at the grocery store. It probably didn’t go over very well.
Because somebody else is paying them? Public funding, indvidual donations, corporate and non-profit sponsorship all come immediately to mind.
Commercial journalism could also be funded with profits from other lines of business. While shareholders might revolt if Disney started streaming World News Tonight ad and subscription free, Michael Bloomberg could remove Bloomberg News paywalls with a phone call.
You can thank AI for the high-gates. It has truly f*ked the web.
Paywalls have existed for much, much longer than AI.
Paywalls have exploded like the Covid pandemic after AI. You can ask any LLM this question and get a truckload of stats confirming this.
Alternative link: https://www.digit.in/news/general/apple-threatened-to-remove...
In other news: archive.ph archive.is are permanently down and the biggest us news conglomerate is blocking the waybackmachine.
> archive.ph archive.is are permanently down
They both work for me. Maybe your ISP is blocking them. Usually easy to work around via different dns resolver or vpn
Cant other AI apps do the same thing as Grok in terms of deepfakes?
Honestly, if it wasn't for Musk' ties to Trump, I'm betting they just would have pulled it.
Twitter is already a bit of a special case because porn is so accessible (although, you must opt in through the browser and cannot opt in through the app).
Discord works the same way I think, so I'm not sure Twitter is special in that regard (there exist a myriad of porn servers on discord, and the company is constantly getting in hot water because of its popularity among kids/teenagers).
Yeah, reading this my reaction is “so why didn’t they do it?”. A less prominent app would have been fulled first and notified later.
Because it makes Android a more attractive option than it otherwise would have been.
Maybe—I don't think anyone is choosing between the two based on access to grok of all things. I think it's simply treated as an extension of twitter, which will almost certainly never be forced out while it remains the premier app for diplomacy and AI porn.
That argument didn't stop them from pulling Fortnite in its hay day though.
Yeah, Apple doesn't care about losing money or pissing off a large user-base. They assume they have enough money and they'll always have the larger user-base.
They care about people pissing in their ocean.
It has a massive user base. And political connections. And lawsuit money. Apple (and Google) will absolutely treat these publishers differently than a random app developer.
Apple doesn't provide any enforcement for apps that are in the top percentile.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freeca...
You'd think Apple would go after the top-charting apps that are leveraging the scam companies (like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire) for actively engaging with scams like this to pump their own numbers up...
(https://old.reddit.com/r/FreeCash/comments/1i4132r/monopoly_... - like this. What the everloving hell? Straight up enticing users to shove themselves into a game, expose themselves to ads galore, and then keep goading them into blowing even more money in the partner app under the guise of 'real cash'.)