Lemme guess, the whole user journey is:
“Ad blocker detected, please disable ad blocker”
Hmpf, OK
“Cookie Banner: you can access this site for free with a shit ton of privacy violations or pay 5$ per second for a little less privacy violations”
Click free
“To continue browsing our site, please subscribe to our newsletter”
Ugh, noone@fakemail.com
“Thank you. Please confirm the subscription by clicking on the link on the confirmation mail to continue reading. Click here to change the address you entered!”
Fuck, ok. Spam@example.com, click confirmation link
“Thank you for subscribing. This article can only be accessed by our members. Click here to create a free account!”
Sign up
“For security reasons, we’ve disabled pasting into the password field. Also we use a custom text field that is not recognized as a target by your password manager.
Password doesn’t match password policy: At least one uppercase and one lowercase letter, at least one digit, at least one special character and exactly one emoji. Maximum of 4 characters allowed.”Finally creates account.
“Your account has used up your quota of free articles this month (0). Please upgrade to our premium subscription ($350 annually) to access this article.”
AaaaaaaAAaaAaAaaaAAAAAHHhhhhH!
Honestly after one or two hurdles like that, I expect it to be a sunk-cost trap.
Where they make you jump through the hoops and then charge you to not feel like you wasted your time jumping through hoops.
Although one job site did allow me to download the new CV they made me before trying to charge me for an account.
But I bet it’s full of white text and creepy metadata (i.e. watermarks) so probably I will copy the design and make it from scratch myself.
Putting up with any bullshit from corpos isnt compromise. You show weakness, you get attacked. It’s not a complicated idea.
If you do that, go straight to hell. No questions.
“Okay, well, you got me. I guess I’ll dig out my wallet.”
~ No one, ever
Seriously, who is this shit even for? A thousand miles of red tape to keep people off your site without paying and all you’ve really done is alienate your paid readership.
That figure comes via the Alliance for Audited Media, and it reveals that The Washington Post’s average paid daily circulation has dropped below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years. To put that in perspective: 97,000 is the sort of figure you’d expect to see from a mid-size regional paper like The Minnesota Star Tribune or The Seattle Times. Not from a globally recognized newsroom with multiple Pulitzers to its name.
I’ll repost the important part because Forbes is, once again, blowing up my screen with random bullshit that’s evaded my popup blocker.
Start reading an article.
10 seconds in “Please subscribe to our newsletter”
The best part is when they work it into the scrolling mechanic. Fucking substack. No. I didn’t come here to sign up for another fucking thing.
I get so startled I usually run away from the page.
“understandable, have a nice day”
Archive.ph is my best friend for those.
Has usually already been saved, and just pulls it up for me. When it doesn’t, I’m helping!
Not even worth it, fuck it if they wanna waste my time I’ma waste my time elsewhere
It works better than sites like 12ft.io ever did for bypassing paywalled articles. 80% of the time the article I want to read is on a site I don’t want to give traffic to, but reading it via archive.ph (or archive.is) doesn’t give them that traffic. Sometimes articles get changed or taken down on the original site, and so you can’t find them when trying to reread or reference them, but that will never happen when they’re archived. Whenever someone on a lemmy instance posts an article and includes the archive link, they will always get my upvote, but especially when linking to a paywalled article. It should just be widely considered good internet etiquette to use and share archived links.
The only bad thing is the goddamn captcha shit they now require when you’re archiving a site. It really killed it for me. I wish there were more sites that worked just as well and did the same thing. There really should be and it’s a damn shame that there’s not.
More often, it’s the Cloudfare anti-bot captcha.
No, thanks, after 5 seconds my curiosity is gone.
after 5 seconds, i don’t even remember what it was about
Im typically looking things like that up on mobile so I will try to turn in reader mode real quick and if that doesnt work immediately then I just leave the page and never look back
For a while I’ve viewed advertising as being psychically assaulted
Haven’t seen this popup in years. Paywalls are way more common
Ladder works pretty well for me!
Just block the anti-adblock banner and move on.
They usually don’t dare to add a second banner on top, so it is free skiing from there
Same with you tube:
YouTube: “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”
A: You have exactly one switch of my VPN country to let me watch my video or we’re done here.
Just in case some didn’t know about it, there’s a convenient Firefox extension called FuckIt that lets you delete any element on a page. It’s very convenient for blocking overlays.
You can also do it by hand of course, but it’s not as practical.
It doesn’t exist in addons.mozilla.org.
Ublock Origin has this feature as well.
Ublock->picker->gone forever.
Can’t get me to leave that easily. I’ll be enjoying your articles, whether you like it or not
Site fails to load
The age of cute browser tricks bypassing paywalls/adblockers is coming to an end. Someone told the corporate world about server-side code and it has ruined everything.
Same goes if it’s missing a Reject All for cookies these days. I’m done with the BS. I can find what I need elsewhere.
