I want to be clear that this is not a reaction to any specific post, just something that I’m thinking about as I’m browsing around.

What do people think about linking to paywalled content? I find it frustrating, personally–but only if I’m not currently paying for the material, because if I am then I’m logged in and likely won’t notice.

Maybe it would be nice to have a guideline, a suggestion, for people posting links to such content as top-level posts to provide a summary (like on this post) for those who don’t have access?

Also, I apologize if this is something that’s been discussed already and decided upon; I’m quite new to Beehaw / Lemmy, and this is on my mind so I figured I’d ask :)

    • MBM@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Morally that does feel a bit weird, because they need to get money from somewhere to do proper journalism

      • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Nice! I havent heard of this one. I’ll have to install this on my partner’s phone. They have an iPhone (I have android). I usually just use the webarchives addon for Firefox mobile to open links in archive.is

      • BuxtonWater@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I’ve found 12ft.io to be largely useless in my experience, it doesn’t do a shit ton of major outlets because they complained to the website and so it doesn’t seem to work

    • jherazob@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Works only for soft paywalls, like these “read 15 articles for free” ones, if it’s a hard paywall like stuff behind a Patreon or something it doesn’t help

  • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    On one hand I’m glad journalism is switching to paid website model, on the other hand - I just wish there was a better way of sharing paywalled content. It’s extra frustrating when it’s an article I enjoy reading and they let me read the first two paragraphs without any warning that it’s paywalled and they throw in 5 pages-long ad in between then suddenly BAM paywall. I’d much rather just have a “pay to see this” banner first or something.

    I really like Ars Technica’s model(and that’s why I’m subscribed) where if you subscribe you get no ads and some benefits like RSS feed to full articles.

    This being said, I don’t think it’s your responsibility to warn us about paywalls.

    • luna@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      This being said, I don’t think it’s your responsibility to warn us about paywalls.

      Why? I want to be notified if I won’t be able to engage with a post. The entire point of sharing things is to start a discussion, and if I can’t do that because something is paywalled, what’s the point?

  • alex [they/them]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s good etiquette. I also think that as you said:

    I find it frustrating, personally–but only if I’m not currently paying for the material, because if I am then I’m logged in and likely won’t notice.

    I never share a paywalled article on purpose, but since I don’t notice if it’s paywalled for my premium subscriptions, I often get it wrong. I’d really rather see a Lemmy-side automated flag rather than users having to check themselves every time they share (and often failing, because they’re humans).

  • Exaggeration207@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    It would be nice to have an option to flag something as “paywall” or “limited paywall” in the UI when creating a post. But I also don’t want to clutter up the UI too much, and I don’t know if enough users would use the feature to justify adding it.

    If it were possible to add flair to posts, that might be a good way of doing it, and meet other user requests related to flair. Not sure how easy it is to add that, but I would definitely use that feature if it were available.