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Why Paywalls Need To Be So Fragile (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Despite the ferment that occurs when yet another digital publisher paywalls a news-site, most paywalls are absurdly easy to circumvent, even using no other software than a web-browser, because of the need to present unrestricted content to the search engines that publicise it. None of the parties involved are considering anyone else's point of view: Google wants free flow of information funded by merit-based advertising revenue; publishers want to restore consumer lock-in in a network environment of story-led consumers who have completely abandoned the concept; and Apple is fine with content-blocking, since it just wants to sell hardware.
I don't mind paywalls. They let me know these sites don't want me as a visitor. I'm good with that. Such things simply generate a reflexive "okthxbai", and that's the end of that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's because viewing one single page on each of ten different sites is not worth a separate $60 per year subscription to each site. This in turn is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
experts-exchange.com is probably the perfect example of an arms race that ended with everybody leaving the site. It used to be relatively easy to get past the paywall. Eventually they started making it harder and harder. Stackoverflow came along, and had no paywall, and actually made things a lot easier to use. They found other ways to make money rather than force people to pay to see answers. Now Stackoverflow has all the users, and most people new to programming haven't even heard of experts-exchange.com
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Then don't make it ridiculously hard to set one up! I'm looking at you, New Scientist. This UK site invites readers to access its premium articles by setting up a free account that requests some demographic information. Fine as a concept, until you get to the point where you choose a password. Acceptable passwords are filtered through a set of complexity rules more appropriate for James Bond 007 License To Kill clearance than a site for socially conscious pop science articles. So far as I'm concerned, a site that won't accept the studiously randomized passwords generated by password managers is not a site I'm interested in accessing.