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kane_magus) wrote2022-01-20 12:03 pm
To hell with news websites that use paywalls
When I click on a website to read a news article, and my screen immediately fills up with a full screen paywall blocking the article I was trying to view, that does *not* make me want to suddenly whip out my wallet and give my CC number to that site. Not even a little bit.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 20, 2022
Instead, it makes me want to go out of my way, expending far more effort than is probably called for, to almost vindictively prevent said website from ever again appearing in my search results or news reader app from which I had initially clicked into the article.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 20, 2022
This time, it was as simple as backing out to the news reader app I was using on my phone, clicking the little ... thing next to the article blurb, and selecting "Hide all stories from <offending website>." See you never, bye.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 20, 2022
If that was their goal all along, i.e. to prevent a freeloader like me from using their website, then great. They won. Good job. If their goal was to extract money from me, however, then they failed horribly.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 20, 2022
There are far too many other, equally (or more) legit sources of news out there that I can look at which *don't* do that bullshit, such that I don't need to and am not going to suffer a site that prefers to hold their own content ransom behind a paywall. It's just that simple.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 20, 2022
Find other, less egregiously obnoxious ways to make money.
— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 20, 2022
In any case, this bullshit hit me just the wrong way at just the wrong time when I was in just the wrong sort of mood, thus this overblown rant thread, which I should probably delete, but am going to post anyway. *shrug*
Addendum not included in the above (obviously): it is actually ridiculously easy to bypass the paywall on the website I'm ranting about above that I won't name here. All you have to do is have NoScript installed on a browser and have it turned on (which, just on general principle, is the default state for pretty much every website I view on my desktop PC, outside of a very rare few). Even so, I would prefer to simply not view said website at all, if I can avoid it, which is why I also have it blocked via Personal Blocklist so that it doesn't even show up in Google search results for me anymore. That's how much I fucking hate total paywalls.