Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder
February 11, 2022 9:03 AM   Subscribe

 
New York Times and possibly other publications have gotten wise to that site's tricks, but it does work as advertised for bunch of others.

I use it about as often as I use Just The Recipe, which strips random food blogger pages of all the "Back when I was a little girl on the farm" bullshit.
posted by emelenjr at 9:45 AM on February 11, 2022 [9 favorites]


The author would like you to subscribe to help keep this service floating. I wonder if the irony is lost on them.
posted by howa2396 at 9:49 AM on February 11, 2022 [26 favorites]


Historically Google didn't cache images, or didn't serve them correctly. Does this work better in 12ft? The Economist sample article on the site hotlinks the economist.com URL for the image which won't work for all paywalls.

Other paywall busters include archive.today, the Wayback machine, and outline.com. I've had good luck with the Bypass Paywalls Clean addon. And ad blockers like uBlock Origin can often be used to stop paywall scripts.

Also it works to just pay for journalism; I pay for several of the main news sources because I use them so often.
posted by Nelson at 9:57 AM on February 11, 2022 [13 favorites]


I've used this on and off for a month and it works half the time. I'm using Bypass Paywalls Clean so I've only asked it to work on the hardest ones.
posted by achrise at 9:58 AM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]


I have moderately decent luck by just disabling Javascript for specific domains. You might not see a couple of fancy graphs and charts, and a couple of sites require JS to load images, but the text almost always comes through just fine.
posted by gimonca at 10:25 AM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]


MetaFilter: all the "Back when I was a little girl on the farm" bullshit.
posted by JanetLand at 10:27 AM on February 11, 2022 [10 favorites]


I'm happy to pay for internet editions of some news sites (which is why I have a paid subscription to the LA Times, despite never having stepped foot in LA). Knowing what we know now about Maggie Haberman, it's hard for me to justify paying for a NYT subscription, and until Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi leave New York I will find ways around their paywalls.
posted by pxe2000 at 11:05 AM on February 11, 2022 [4 favorites]


MetaFilter: PAY CONTENT CREATORS FOR THEIR WORK!

Also MetaFilter: Oooh, another way to get around a paywall!
posted by davidmsc at 11:28 AM on February 11, 2022 [25 favorites]


The beauty of it is, those two statements aren't contradictory. I personally pay quite a few creators for their work, work that they choose to distribute freely. Lots of other people do. It's a system that is proven to work.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:40 AM on February 11, 2022 [7 favorites]


There's also just using your local library account to access news: for example LAPL offers 24 hr passes to NYT. Available for all CA libraries! Free and also guilt-free!
posted by toastyk at 11:40 AM on February 11, 2022 [12 favorites]


I happily pay for a couple newspaper subscriptions. But if I click on a headline or a recipe title and I get a page full of ads or somebody's childhood reminiscing, I feel duped. The web site didn't give me what it said it was going to give me. For that reason, I I like having several tools available to make sure I can do what I set out to do. I always have a laptop and a phone handy, and I have multiple web browsers on both devices.

I work in an industry where there are legal consequences for misleading language on our site, links that don't work as advertised, etc., so I'm especially sensitive to web links with unwelcome surprises on the other end.
posted by emelenjr at 12:32 PM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'll pay for a few places, but I'm not going to pay EVERYWHERE and especially not for one-off sites for one article. Nobody has a solution for that one.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:52 PM on February 11, 2022 [8 favorites]


I've been doing a lot of thinking about the narrative-before-recipes thing recently, so I went ahead and made a separate FPP about it.
posted by mosst at 1:01 PM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]


I hate the NYT, therefore, despite the fact that my library has a subscription, I prefer to jump paywalls. Fuck 'em.
posted by evilDoug at 2:00 PM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]


Awesome. I get pay walled on my local newspaper even thought I am a subscriber.
posted by nestor_makhno at 4:17 PM on February 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


Wish I could pay a la carte for some content, rather than monthly/annual subscriptions.

e.g. The Economist is $189 a year. Far too much for the 3 to 7 articles I'm interested in reading each year. I'd pay 0.50¢ to $1 for the odd article now and again. But $4.50 an issue is a bit much. And my fleeting interest isn't worth the annual subscription.

We have subscriptions for 3 major news outlets, so we're not against paying for content we'd use regularly.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of easy online options for when you're just interested in picking up an article or even an issue (of a publication behind a paywall) every now and again. At least not that I'm aware of, anyway.
posted by Davenhill at 12:28 AM on February 12, 2022 [6 favorites]


still waiting for universal micropayments. heh. if it ever happens, it'll be long after I'm dead.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:28 AM on February 12, 2022 [5 favorites]


Bookmarklet: javascript:window.location="https://12ft.io/"+window.location
posted by chortly at 4:19 PM on February 12, 2022


I subscribed to the Washington Post because it was like $10. Plus, every dollar I give to Jeff Bezos puts him that much closer to Mars.
posted by mecran01 at 6:11 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


When sites reveal their entire content to Google's crawler, so it shows up in search results, displacing other content, then block it to ordinary people, that is a problem. They're using Google as a means of advertising their content. I have no sympathy for people who do that.
posted by JHarris at 7:49 PM on February 15, 2022 [2 favorites]


Which is Google's policy to allow paywalled content to appear in search results. Specifically that a site presents a different version of a page to the GoogleBot than it does the person clicking on a search result, which is a no-no for which you can get nuked if you're a nobody. Here's the story as of five years ago, and as far as I know nothing's changed.
posted by rhizome at 7:54 PM on February 15, 2022 [2 favorites]


It's both of their faults. I'm not going to defend Google at all.
posted by JHarris at 10:41 PM on February 15, 2022


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