I don’t get it, this stuff is already behind a paywall already. There’s no darkening of the internet of news if news is already paywalled.
Looks like false controversy to me. All publishers have to do is demand a login and that’s it. Articles that are now behind a paywall will continue to do so.
There’s no difference that I can understand outside of a slight adjustment in paywall protection. Seriously can anyone explain what he’s going on about?
They've been using soft paywalls which allow people to read a certain number of articles per month for free. To prevent users from simply using incognito mode to pretend every visit is their first visit, publishers started detecting incognito mode and blocking them from reading articles using it (without signing in).
Which was quite frustrating for us that only ever surf in incognito.
Now we'll see what their response is, probably something moronic as 5 views per IP.
Better to just require an account straight up. Then there is no point for anyone to link to them and we will get rid of the whole "will I be able to read this link mess".
Purely anecdotally, I never remember seeing the "Incognito walls" before a year or so ago; paywalls are clearly able to function even if they can't stop the use of private modes.
Many/most paywalls can be bypassed by blocking or wiping cookies. I wonder if news sites are going to come for cookie blocking next.
I think the author is upset because publishers want to have their cake and eat it too: It has long been google’s (and all other successful search engines’) policy that sites should present the same content to the web crawler and to human beings.
Soft paywalls are essentially a loophole in that (at least superficially) pro-consumer rule, and incognito blockers are apparently taking that loophole one step too far. This move will fix the issue by changing the browser instead of page ranks.
Here is an unfounded conspiracy theory: People noticed that regularly clearing cookies works better than incognito mode, so they were switching to that because of incognito blockers, and that presents an existential threat to Google’s cash cow.
I don’t believe the previous paragraph, but I really want an extension that nukes all browser state if my computer / device is idle for more than 4 hours. The only exceptions would be bookmarks and password management.
You can still offer people content for free and also not be defeated by incognito. Offer regular news articles for free, and make premium editorials and analysis require a (reasonably priced) subscription.
But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.
And I had to call to Croatia to cancel mine. There are definitely dark patterns these guys using. Which was very surprising to see from true-journalism-northern-star
With the Economist you can at least do it via email, or if you’re doing digital only you can use a subscription via Apple’s in app purchases etc and manage it that way.
I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access
The regional newspaper in my state is $25/6 months, which includes the physical Sunday paper and DRM-free downloadable PDFs of the newspaper every day that you can view on any device.
About a year ago I looked around at papers in other states, and the pricing and benefits were similar. It's only the super-premium papers that charge much more, but even the New York Times maxes out at $40/month for physical Sunday + digital. I'm OK paying a premium for the New York Times because I understand it's expensive to pay reporters and editors and photographers to travel to and live in cities around the world.
I think if the people who whine about "I'd pay $xx if the newspaper only did $yy" actually put their money where their mouths are, journalism (especially local) would be in a better place.
I did my last check-through of all the newspaper plans about 3 months ago, and out of the 6 on my list, not one offered a clear cut subscription. I actually, really don't want a physical newspaper. I do want clear subscription terms.
Your regional newspaper does sound super reasonable though, and I hope more newspapers follow that general model.
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week
Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend.
that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to read anyway!
But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
I'm confused, where did you get the impression that he only wants to read the cooking section and nothing from the regular newspaper?
Or do you want him to pay $200 for the general contents + $40 a year for recipes? Is it the same kind of deal for getting business breaking news or yoga tutorials? That seems crazy to me.
It's a reasonable request that I concur with. This sort of piecemeal subscription model is really annoying. The main reason all other streaming services took off was because people didn't want piecemeal cable bundles. Once you pay for a subscription, you should get everything under that banner. No more paywalls. That's a reasonable expectation when seen in the context of other streaming services. Second, if you are pretending to be a tech company offering soft services on the internet, act like one. nytimes is the slowest and most bloated ad/tracking infested site that I visit. It brings firefox mobile to a crawl. This may be one of the reasons why a middleman like apple news may actually work, simply by reducing the friction. If you can make nytimes.com behave like lwn.net, I would pay.
Isn't it? It seems that most journalism these days consists of taking things from a news agency feed and polluting them with garbage opinions. Might as well read the source.
The problem is there is so much content available on the web, but there isn't yet a federated subscription service to support it all. I would pay ~ $5 a month for news access, but I'm certainly not going to pay 2 or 5 or 10 dollars a month for each random site I visit to read their couple articles that may interest me. I just will skip their content.
I go the other direction. I am way too fast a reader and read too widely to handle per-article microtransactions well. I do have a subscription to a couple of my top magazines and news sources, but end up reading up to the free allotment on many, many more every month. I'd happily pay $30-50/mo for unlimited access to many sources, but it'd have to have 10+ of my favorites on board to make it worthwhile. I read 20-50 serious articles a day, across free and paywalled and subscription content. I'm unwilling to pay $10-25/mo for each source individually. But if the average could get down around $5/mo for each major source (that I'll read 15-50 articles/mo from, given the access), and leftover change to the ones I read only occasionally, I'd be delighted. Basically, yeah, I want Spotify for journalism, even if it's a good bit more expensive.
As Maciej Cegłowski pointed out some years ago, we already have a working micropayment system for content.[1] Unfortunately, the payments are going to carriers/service providers to pay for the page bloat that comes from not having another micropayment system.
No. This isn't about Google unlocking paywalls. This is about Google fixing a bug where the presence of Icognito Mode could be detected with JS which is totally against the premise of Incognito Mode whose purpose it is to be undetected, not to be detected as somebody wanting to be undetected.
Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then none of this applies.
“Intrusion attempt” as alleged in the article is more like an “intrusion attempt” by the publishers to exploit a bug in the user’s web browser.
Publishers have every ability to use some DRMed iOS app and bypass the web completely. Instead they want their cake (free SE & sharing traffic) and eat it too (paid or demographically tracked and ad targeted visitors.)
God, the tone of that article was nauseating. Google isn't "unlocking" anything. They're just fixing a loophole in incognito mode that shouldn't have been there in the first place. And it's not like that was the only option for this. When these 'incognito detectors' first became viable, I just set up firefox where when you quit out it automatically cleared your entire history. So I would normally browse in Chrome, but then when I wanted to see paywalled contact I would just right click and open in Firefox.
Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that "Only show a couple articles free" is not a 100% technologically viable option. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game if that's the behavior you're going for.
There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an account to view content.
To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.
At this point, publishers should probably just accept that any tracking is unacceptable, so if they want people to pay (and therefore login), then they need to stop funneling data to ad networks and other PII aggregators.
Many of them probably also didn't set the ad blocker up themselves - they have tech-savvy relatives handle their computer stuff, and those tech-savvy relatives have realized that fewer ads means fewer malicious social engineering ads means less malware to remove during the next visit.
I doubt that even 1% of internet users understand the extent of the PII that is collected. I would guess if the general public understood how all this worked, there would be many more people who objected to the practice.
It's only my personal opinion, but I don't care at all about tracking. They can track me all they like. I block ads because they make my browsing slow, cause my CPU to turbo boost, interrupt my browsing, clutter the web pages excessively. I suspect a huge majority of that 26% is similar to me in this.
Why not? Saves you the trouble of building and maintaining a secure access system. You likely gain more users because of network effects, which doesn’t cut your advertising budget so much as supplements it. If your trying to preserve user privacy, there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.
My relationship with my readers is our most valuable asset, and I don't want it mediated by companies who compete with me for ad dollars. It's the same reason I publish content on our own domain and not Medium or Facebook or LinkedIn.
As a user, there's absolutely no way I'm going to give you a real name and email address if you roll your own authentication. I probably won't use your service at all.
When you use a federated login, you still can assign an email address to the federated user. Most of them will even pass one to you.
But, do you really want your users to have the added friction and probably just move on to another site, and do you really want the responsibility of providing your own authorization? I work for a B2B SASS company and we highly encourage users to use their company’s AD account that we federate with.
Publishers actually do use something of a federated service to manage subscriptions for the most part. I'd say those services have some catching up to do. Hearst runs such a service:
The problem with requiring an account to view content is doing so removes your content entirely from Google, and probably from most social media snippet generators.
Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content. The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.
If you put all your content behind a paywall, you're siloing yourself off from the entire rest of the internet, at least as far as discoverability goes.
> The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.
Do keep in mind that this isn't so much a loophole, but an agreement that Google made with publishers so that they could stay ranked on Google. In the wake of this they might reach a different agreement.
If Google had a setting for "I am a subscriber to x,y,z -- please include them in my results" I would be so happy. I want to tell Google that I'm a Red Hat subscriber and want their KB articles first.
They seem to allow enough of their pages to appear to enable Google to see it. I can always see the first few sentences and the titles of WSJ articles, that's probably what google can see too.
I don't think it's that -- the amount shown to Google isn't enough to provide any kind of meaningful SEO. My guess is WSJ has something worked out with Google.
This entire system is just borked. And part of it, is why fake-news spread so easily, since people can't read on newspapers without having to pay for it (which should be fine) but in poor countries, people are not paying for this and end up relying on low quality news sites, which are filled with fake and click bait stuff that gets shared on whatsapp all the time.
Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj and their revenue will probably go even down.
subscribe to read? no way. my modus operandi is that if I get to a link and it asks for a login or to subscribe, I just close the tab. there's a few websites that I don't even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps growing to me.
Yes, but with a significant false positive rate due to IP address sharing, and you can get more articles by switching IP’s (unless someone else exhausted the new IP before you got it).
Not really. Problems arise when you have many people behind the same IP. You can hand-wave this problem away for family units behind a router, but you'll soon find out there are entire institutions (schools, office buildings with lots of unrelated companies in them, etc) that will share an IP.
Large scale NAT is one reason that would fail. Some mobile carriers have most of their customers behind a handful of IPs. Wikipedia has dealt with this a lot, and has a page explaining why conflating an IP address to a person isn't usually the way to go.
One of my problems is that even with the publications I subscribe to, I still get plenty of ads served up to me. This problem is especially acute with the NY Times, where their Android app seems to have an issue loading both ads and content efficiently.
I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in pricing.
That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.
They should think hard about their next move because all that these paywalls have done is make it so I don't read their articles, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Maybe I'm the only one? I'm definitely not signing up to read them either.
Keeping up with day-to-day or even week-to-week news is very, very nearly worthless to almost everyone. It's just entertainment, barely—if at all—more laudable or improving than watching soap operas or reading airport novels.
> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content
Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's absurd language.
I would argue they are intruding in that they are accessing information from my browser that they shouldn't have access to. If their website allows me to read an article they don't want me to by going to "www.nytimes.com" that's not an intrusion, that's poor gating on their part.
Couldn't you say the same thing about any security hole? If Equifax didn't want people reading their databases then they shouldn't have allowed anyone with an internet connection to remotely execute code on their systems via https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/issues/8064
There's an enormous difference between accessing a public endpoint, and accessing one that isn't intended to be public. To use addresses as an analogy:
Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem.
Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.
The author was deliberately trying to use incognito mode to view the paywalled content, so this is imho rightfully called an intrusion attempt.
Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing.
The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.
I am deliberately using incognito by default (eg now), and if websites don't want to give me their content without tracking me then they should properly paywall their content and ask me to log in - then we both understand what's going on.
Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We will track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you are an intruder!"
I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?
I would think incognito would make it easier to track, if your session persists until you close incognito. Youd be much better off with umatrix blocking cookies and javascript.
It's the language of someone married to a business model. The publishers can't exist without search engine indexing and user tracking, but can't make money without paywalling.
We have the technology to subsidize media creation appropriately, in the manner of performance royalties organizations. However, since there's no equivalent of radio station middlemen, it's not a problem that can be solved by an unregulated market.
But how will we pay the NYT to try to drag the US into wars while David Brooks lectures debt-loaded millennials about work ethic and family values unless we let them continue to exploit a bug in web browsers?
Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.
It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?
Not scalable. This is like saying medical bills are under control because of GoFundMe. Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited and it requires tons of work for zero pay while you build a follower base large enough.
"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.
Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.
The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].
The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.
--
[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.
[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.
The NYT has like 4,000 employees. There are 40,000 journalists in the US (just journalists). All of patreon has 100,000 creators.
The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.
How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.
I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.
As that article points out, that is far more related to Trump being elected (something they played a major role in by helping squash a progressive reform candidate in favor of an institutionalist neoliberal) than to their browser paywall strategy. It says far more about how online media is rewarded for making things worse, a scary lesson I hope not too many people learn.
I don't get news from the NYT and am quite happy continuing to do that regardless of their monetary strategy (and by the way, Google is extremely profitable with free + ads).
The starting date is in 2011 when they introduced a metered paywall and has seen an increase yearly. The "Trump effect" was a substantial boost in 2016, but only a part of the overall trend.
I don't have a problem with the content not being available for free. But the publishers want the best of both worlds. They could easily, for example, make all content require a login, but they know that would kill their readership. This idea that they are somehow entitled to know how many times a non-logged in user has visited their site is absurd.
> We tried to breach the paywalls of the publishers listed using Chrome’s current browser (v. 75), in Incognito Mode. Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content.
The whole thing uses weird language to try to paint the practice of serving one thing to google and another to people coming from google as some kind of feature.
This is not the big deal that they are making it out to be, and I don't expect it to have a huge impact on publishers.
The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.
If you are a publisher relying on detecting private mode to compel people to subscribe then you have a content problem - or a lack of marketing talent.
I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web/digital) and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New Yorker).
If your entire industry is only barely viable through the use of user-hostile tracking, I find it hard to feel bad when the ad tech loopholes are closed.
Not 100% sure but I think it is something to do with being able to write to localstorage (e.g. if the site figures it can't write there then it is in Incognito). I read it was something like that.
Haven’t we done this experiment enough times? When the publishers switch to hard paywalls their viewership tanks, their advertisers freak out, and they immediately roll it back. We’ve seen this in Europe we’ve seen this in the US when newspapers tried to force Google to stop indexing their content - turns out it is much better to allow Google to index. I expect to see a repeat here. All the paywalls do is send more revenue to the other guys. As long as their is one single source for content that’s not behind a paywall, no paywall will ever work. Furthermore most news outlets today focus on soft news and opinion pieces, and I really don’t care what tantrum some star or starlet is throwing, what else Donald Trump said that offended someone, who isn’t going to the Hamptons this summer, etc. It is news to someone but I’ll never spend a penny on it.
News publishers should get their asses together in one building and build a "netflix for news". No I don't want to register or put my CC info at your US 10k town TV station with a single overworked dude managing IT just to follow a reddit link, but link yourself with a central ID provider that manages payment and does not disclose my personal data, and I'd be in for it.
We had this in Slovakia (https://piano.io/ ), but it was not very successful, and all media companies now have their own systems. But they seems to expand to other markets.
I think that their main problem was that at the same time, the subscription was low (so didn't bring much revenue) and at the same time people hated it because now they had to pay for something that was free before. So I guess once we get used to pay for journalism, then something like netflix for media might work.
I think none of this will work in the long run. There is too much content available for free. I have a digital magazine subscription (access to 1000s of magazines) but I hardly ever use it because there is so much alternative content. I might cancel in the future.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadLooks like false controversy to me. All publishers have to do is demand a login and that’s it. Articles that are now behind a paywall will continue to do so.
There’s no difference that I can understand outside of a slight adjustment in paywall protection. Seriously can anyone explain what he’s going on about?
Now we'll see what their response is, probably something moronic as 5 views per IP.
Better to just require an account straight up. Then there is no point for anyone to link to them and we will get rid of the whole "will I be able to read this link mess".
Purely anecdotally, I never remember seeing the "Incognito walls" before a year or so ago; paywalls are clearly able to function even if they can't stop the use of private modes.
Many/most paywalls can be bypassed by blocking or wiping cookies. I wonder if news sites are going to come for cookie blocking next.
Soft paywalls are essentially a loophole in that (at least superficially) pro-consumer rule, and incognito blockers are apparently taking that loophole one step too far. This move will fix the issue by changing the browser instead of page ranks.
Here is an unfounded conspiracy theory: People noticed that regularly clearing cookies works better than incognito mode, so they were switching to that because of incognito blockers, and that presents an existential threat to Google’s cash cow.
I don’t believe the previous paragraph, but I really want an extension that nukes all browser state if my computer / device is idle for more than 4 hours. The only exceptions would be bookmarks and password management.
Having said that as a user I should be able to be anonymous at will too...
But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.
Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them. Infuriating.
I usually “unsubscribe” from these kind of services by changing my credit card to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce.
Yeah, luckily I subscribed through paypal, so I could block them through that.
I learned my lesson from LA Fitness. Check the cancellation process before signing up for anything that requires a contract.
I suppose that should be common sense, but I never thought about it until I had to mail a freaking letter to their HQ requesting cancellation.
The regional newspaper in my state is $25/6 months, which includes the physical Sunday paper and DRM-free downloadable PDFs of the newspaper every day that you can view on any device.
About a year ago I looked around at papers in other states, and the pricing and benefits were similar. It's only the super-premium papers that charge much more, but even the New York Times maxes out at $40/month for physical Sunday + digital. I'm OK paying a premium for the New York Times because I understand it's expensive to pay reporters and editors and photographers to travel to and live in cities around the world.
I think if the people who whine about "I'd pay $xx if the newspaper only did $yy" actually put their money where their mouths are, journalism (especially local) would be in a better place.
Your regional newspaper does sound super reasonable though, and I hope more newspapers follow that general model.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/gift
Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend.
that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to read anyway!
But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
Or do you want him to pay $200 for the general contents + $40 a year for recipes? Is it the same kind of deal for getting business breaking news or yoga tutorials? That seems crazy to me.
> But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
Stop that. The original goalpost clearly says $25-50.
Isn't it? It seems that most journalism these days consists of taking things from a news agency feed and polluting them with garbage opinions. Might as well read the source.
[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Why would they offer facts for free and charge for the opinions they are trying to use their reputation on facts to promote?
Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then none of this applies.
This is part of the articles point. Forcing people to login is going to hurt conversion.
Publishers have every ability to use some DRMed iOS app and bypass the web completely. Instead they want their cake (free SE & sharing traffic) and eat it too (paid or demographically tracked and ad targeted visitors.)
As long as sites have "backdoors" around the paywall for SEO purposes, these types of extensions will work.
Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that "Only show a couple articles free" is not a 100% technologically viable option. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game if that's the behavior you're going for.
To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.
I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/most-americans...
People on HN keep using this in a number of contexts as an excuse to not even try.
I'm tired of it. Maybe we are to late. But if try to avoid failure then at least we have a small chance.
But, do you really want your users to have the added friction and probably just move on to another site, and do you really want the responsibility of providing your own authorization? I work for a B2B SASS company and we highly encourage users to use their company’s AD account that we federate with.
https://www.cds-global.com/
Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content. The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.
If you put all your content behind a paywall, you're siloing yourself off from the entire rest of the internet, at least as far as discoverability goes.
Do keep in mind that this isn't so much a loophole, but an agreement that Google made with publishers so that they could stay ranked on Google. In the wake of this they might reach a different agreement.
If Google had a setting for "I am a subscriber to x,y,z -- please include them in my results" I would be so happy. I want to tell Google that I'm a Red Hat subscriber and want their KB articles first.
That's not true for the WSJ.
hmm this is exactly what the update will prevent...
Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj and their revenue will probably go even down.
subscribe to read? no way. my modus operandi is that if I get to a link and it asks for a login or to subscribe, I just close the tab. there's a few websites that I don't even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps growing to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...
It's bad for publishers but not catastrophic.
The tone of this article was very alarmist. The author says opening incognito is an "intrusion attempt". That's not what this means.
So they look at this information from the publisher side.
I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in pricing.
That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.
Modifying browsers is preferable to that. It will (hopefully) solve the the problem at the source, and make a HN-level solution redundant.
I imagine other news aggregators face the same problem.
Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's absurd language.
Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem.
Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.
Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing.
The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.
Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We will track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you are an intruder!"
I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?
We have the technology to subsidize media creation appropriately, in the manner of performance royalties organizations. However, since there's no equivalent of radio station middlemen, it's not a problem that can be solved by an unregulated market.
Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.
It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?
Such as?
See https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-ye...
"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.
Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.
The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].
The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.
--
[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.
[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.
>Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited
isn't that true for all industries?
>Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
lol wat. you got a source for that?
The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.
How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...
I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.
I don't get news from the NYT and am quite happy continuing to do that regardless of their monetary strategy (and by the way, Google is extremely profitable with free + ads).
Google isn't free.
https://hackernoon.com/how-does-google-earn-money-as-simple-...
Intrusion attempt? Excuse me?
https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incog...
> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt
The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.
If you are a publisher relying on detecting private mode to compel people to subscribe then you have a content problem - or a lack of marketing talent.
I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web/digital) and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New Yorker).
If there was a way to pay once for all sites i frequent to support them and at the same time block the tracking, I'd be interested.
And if there are other likely ones the sites will be able to fall back to?
Basically, attempting to use FileSystem API but getting an Error === Incognito
I think that their main problem was that at the same time, the subscription was low (so didn't bring much revenue) and at the same time people hated it because now they had to pay for something that was free before. So I guess once we get used to pay for journalism, then something like netflix for media might work.