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So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s sad. It never occurred to me we’d get here.
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.
> 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?
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It serves ads even if you pay, so for me, no.
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.
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.
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 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?
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!
Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.
People demand access to everything.
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.
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.
>they don't scale
Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive.
>they break the promise of an open web
The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.
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.
People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.
Please don't use strawman arguments. It's immature.
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.
> 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.
But you weren't a journalist trying to earn a living.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You can thank AI for the high-gates. It has truly f*ked the web.
Paywalls have existed for much, much longer than AI.
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
That is interesting. Thanks for the heads-up. I would consider it strange tho, if my ISP declared the ban in a Russian message, quoting a Russian law. It works today, so who knows what happened. Next time I'll take a screenshot because that was really alien.
Cant other AI apps do the same thing as Grok in terms of deepfakes?
Grok is the most risqué off-the-shelf model. So, not so much a question of "can't", as "won't".
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.
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'.)
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.
Because it makes Android a more attractive option than it otherwise would have been.