This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
Gift articles previously were accessible just with the link. The latest article I attempted to read now requires me to first sign up
edit
The article in question https://wapo.st/4fp62oH
I am well aware of many work arounds. The point of this post was to show wapo has changed the way gift articles work, which previously didn’t require a workaround
Gifting someone a news article feels so dystopian
I have some issues with WaPo's reporting at times, but honestly, how do we expect to fund quality journalism if we never pay for news?
I don't disagree, but ideally quality journalism should be treated as a public good, as it's, well, a source of information about the world, an extention of education, you could say
A lot of European countries have tax-supported independent news organizations
Publicly funded news corporations with journalistic freedom would be nice
We just read free fearmongering content on right wing extremist websites instead, duh
The right answer is through memes and 4chan
This article is reposted. Or mirrored or whatever.
I'd rather fund quality original news none-for-profit. But all major news articles are in it for the money. How do you expect me to pay for something that has a vested interest in making money off the stuff they report?
I am fine paying for news. My main problem is these newspapers use manipulation to spread their news. They use cookies to limit the number of articles you can read. This allows people that can see the article thinking everyone else can. Also the entire article can be read by search engines. So when people are searching for certain info, the find the article and they are paywalled. It's a major waste of time. Just don't allow those articles to be searched then.
On top of all that the offers the give are introductory. They will have a signifcant jump afterwards. They will hound you to resubscribe and sell your information for as much as they legally (usually) can.
As much as I hate them, ads. The same newspapers have always made money. Along with the Wikipedia route of asking for donations
It's like back in the day gifting rout bought newspaper copy to someone else to read
Summary: No longer gifts.
yea.. that ain't gonna happen. ever.
i will just paste your headline into a web search and find another source (often the same exact article).
*grift articles
Pro tip: the login wall is added at the end of page load. If you tap the Esc key at the right moment to interrupt the load, you'll end up with the full article rendered without the bullshit
Archive.ph
Beside the point. That was never required for gifted articles
Blocked in my country because some asshole archived some csam
Archive.is and their mirrors use a secret sauce of premium accounts and/or content filter to remove the paywall code before archiving
might be something one of the filter lists can take care of. with scripting disabled and ubo enabled, article is readable at the sample link provided.
What happened if you hit start reading without entering an email?
It throws a verification error. You also cannot just provide a nonsense email address
You can't provide any email address, by the looks of it. Even a Gmail address (which I assume would be most likely to be whitelisted) fails. Guess that's one way to force subscriptions...