A lot of paywalls disappear when you turn off javascript. I use a plugin that adds a button to quickly toggle javascript for specific web pages. It works for a large percentage of paywalled articles. On the few paywalled sites where I actually use javascript, it is easy to just turn it back on again when needed. The plugin I use is JavaScript Switcher, but there are others out there.
I did not know about reader mode. It seems that it is unavailable for some websites, so it can still be useful to switch off JavaScript in those cases.
iOS users: add this shortcut to your share sheet and click on it when you encounter a paywall and itll open the archive link which lets you read and share the article without a paywall icloud.com/…/ede57eb29515446ab7cd68b5a8a6e311
Firefox users on any platform: this extension opens the archived version of the article and lets you read or share the article without paywalls addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…/archive-page/
The firefox extension can be used on android and ios as well (ios users can install it with the Orion web browser)
Archive.is is useful, for sure. Another option that I have used for a long time is BypassPaywalls. It works on Firefox, as well as Chromium based browsers. https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
archive.is/archive.ph the one mentioned in the main post and one that is most effective out of all the options
12ft Ladder - What I like about 12ft.io is that once it gets rid of the paywall, it makes sure the website stays as the mobile site (if you're using your phone), whilst archive.ph uses the desktop form by default. However, 12ft.io does not work as well as archive.ph
Remove Paywall - Even more limited than 12ft.io, but it's another alternative. As the site says, make sure to add RemovePaywall.com/ ahead of the URL if you want to copy the unpaywalled link.
Chip - The most limited option out of all four, I think. Another disadvantage is that I don't think you can copy the unpaywalled version's link, unlike the others.
You copy the URL to the paywalled article, paste it in archive. In most cases, someone else has already archived it already and it's ready to view.
I also use Bypass Paywalls for Firefox in the browser, this takes care of less intrusive paywalls - for the big boys (big news orgs) the archive.is solution is the best.
On Firefox, usually reader mode ignores paywalls. It is also nice for showing pages in a standard format, ignoring the styles of the site, which is nice for sites with crap layouts.
A lot of articles load all of the content before the paywall, so another easy (but kind of scuffed) option is to just stop the page from loading after the content has loaded but before the paywall has
nice :) im making a lemmy account on lemmy.studio and will wait until they approve my account to give it a try! Might use both kbin and lemmy for fun haha
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