is there a way to de-paywall 404media.co?
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They don't have to be evil or scamming people for this to be a shitty barrier that prevents people from viewing the information.
You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.
Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice's tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.
Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.
And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.
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Indeed it is, but I'm concerned about the above, and thus don't create user accounts willy nilly.
I could use a fake name and fake email, but a lot of sites require that you validate your phone number too, and it's starting to become a lot of commodifiable data points.
... Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free "account" but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you'll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.
So... if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?
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First of all, you are on feddit.nl and cannot speak for"Lemmy". That said- if anything, "Lemmy" users should be supporting independent journalism like 404 Media.
In fairness, this is a dot ml board so 404 might get banned for completely different reasons.
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In fairness, this is a dot ml board so 404 might get banned for completely different reasons.
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... Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free "account" but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you'll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.
So... if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I'm not talking about this website specifically, a lot of sites ask for way too much info.
I just click away when I see a login wall, regardless of requirements. If I really want to read it, I use 12ft.io or similar.
Edit: Here's a wall-less link: https://archive.ph/mFHH8
I really don't feel like setting up an alt email address just to read a single article. -
You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.
Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice's tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.
Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.
And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.
There's other methods of preventing scraping rather than requiring us to give up our data to view the content. Maybe they're perfect and it doesn't get sold or abused, but how can we know that for every single site? Also, how to we know it's secure forever, even when they enahitify in the future?
