Die Wahrheit kostet viel Geld. Jedes Abo kostet Geld #FakeNews sind hingegen heute kostenlos an jeder Ecke zu haben bei Nius, Reichelt und ähnlichen Schauergeschichtenerzählern zu lesen. Und die dramatischen, mitunter auch demokratiegefährdenden Folgen sind bereits heute klar und deutlich in der Gesellschaft abzulesen.
Lesenswerter Beitrag von @avatter zu "Wie die #Paywalls der Zeitungen der Hetze in die Hände spielen" https://www.avatter.de/wordpress/2024/04/wie-die-paywalls-der-zeitungen-der-hetze-in-die-haende-spielen/
Once again, a New York Times columnist is loudly baffled that the American public is mostly unaware of the Biden administration's solid -- even spectacular -- record of achievement.
Once again, a New York Times columnist totally fails to even consider a key reason -- that news media have done almost nothing to let the American public know about that record.
@dangillmor The #NYTimes#WAPO and others have become commodities. They #EnShitified themselves when they began putting profits before journalism by putting up #Paywalls and forcing #Subscriptions. Here is a letter I wrote to the times--On #SadieHawkinsDay --which sums up what they have become and the damage they have done.
"was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it." (emphasis added)
Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.
For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search.
You can also use 12ft.io.
Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the "Google Bot" web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.
Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.
The pages aren't necessarily rendered like how you would expect.
More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:
“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we'll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”
It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.
The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world's webpages.
The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.
We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.
From the summary:
"Scientific articles that are freely available to the public grew by more than seven-fold in volume and increased in influence relative to those behind #paywalls from 2003 to 2022…In 2022, 51% of articles, of which status we know, were in #OpenAccess journals compared to 23% in 2003."
Journalists and news website workers definitely have to be paid well, but I also find it extremely weird that people have to pay to know the truth. Crazy, right? And I hate paywalls, but I AM paying for a handful of news sites.
'Tumblr is doing away with Post Plus, the feature that lets creators charge users a subscription to access their content. Starting on December 1st, creators will no longer be able to enable Post Plus on their blogs. The discontinuation of Post Plus comes just weeks after a leaked memo revealed the platform’s plans to downsize after struggling to meet usage and revenue targets.'
So, I've noticed that the Dark Reader #extension on #Firefox mobile (android) allows me to bypass #paywalls on many news sites. It appears to work on #NYT, #WaPo, and others. I don't understand why it happens, but it was a pleasant discovery!
imo, as a non-tech person, I think it has to do with #trackers in article #images? There are no images if you use Dark Reader, and in my #browser, when I use a #Javascript blocker, it blurs images and bypasses most paywalls 🤷🏻♀️
Nein zum Heim: 80 'kiffende Araber' könnten "unsere Mädchen belästigen" - sagt der Geschäftsführer. Die Freie #Waldorfschule Bargteheide wehrt sich gegen eine Unterkunft für Geflüchtete neben ihrer Schule.
"Besorgte Eltern" der Waldorfschule hatten schon bei der Stadtverordneten-Sitzung gestört und „Wo bleibt das Wohlergehen der Kinder?“ gerufen.
The folks at The Audiencers interviewed me about my views on #paywalls and #SEO. They put together a great piece, with a cover image inspired by me calling myself an 'old dinosaur of SEO':
I am opposed to the platforms being the ones who control and manipulate how payment, ads and visibility work.
(Actually, I am not even opposed, I just don't care and I won't go there if I can avoid it.)
I'd encourage writers to publish their work under their own website or blog. Once they are there, feel free to paywall it, promote ads, ask for donations or whatever monetisation mechanism they wish to use.
I use Steam and all but the "games shouldn't be more than $1" attitude so many people seem to have developed is really maddening. And definitely helped curate this mobile era of total shit.
Of course, we're still getting great single player premium games, so I don't think it's mattered toooooo much. But still very disapointing.
@ravindra@SirTapTap ...as well tzey should be obligated if they use gambling-esque "Wilson Lootbox Mechanics" witch basically turns a game into #PayToLoose shit or whether there's like a cosmetics store and whether or not progression is slowed down artifically to dark-pattern players into paying.
Were the #GPLv3 not ideological garbage but actually comitted to #FLOSS remaining #public, it would've chosen #PublicAccessibilit to code as priority over illegally demanding surrender of all #Patents and #IP.
I probably shouldn’t tell you that whenever you encounter a paywalled article on the Internet, or a popup that blocks the article from you unless you sign up or disable your adblocker, you can put the URL in archive.is and read it there comfortably, so I won’t.
Do you like #news, but hate #paywalls ? Check out the Gift Article Gazette!
The GAG aggregates the "#GiftArticle" hashtag from across the largest Mastodon instances and filters the results into a friendly, browsable list. Stay informed with the help of the fedi!
Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead (arstechnica.com)