Memes

And never, EVER disable JavaScript on that website and reload the page! Not even if your Ad blocker lets you selectively do it.

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don't work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don't even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn't work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it's easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won't work on stub articles, and just janky because you're manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don't have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you're trying to do a quick copy you're going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it's possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they're probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it's not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you're signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it's a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

This must be like the disclaimer warnings on those "vine bricks" that were popular during Prohibition.

Prepend.

Many sites don't work like that and don't even load the content from the server before the paywall check.

But I have a trick that work 100% of the time. Just don't read those sites.

I get that journalism and entertainment magazines have workers and need to be paid BUT:

They were getting paid when I could pay a cheap physical newspaper if I want to read it and usually had those for free anyway. As you'll get newspapers on most public places and one single newspaper would serve a whole family. In my house we didn't really paid more than 4€ a month and got physical things that you could just keep. Now with digital distribution you own nothing and it is far more expensive. So... No. Also they get a ton of public money through institutional advertisement, so I'm already basically paying for them without getting access to their content.

So unless they are willing to change their model I'll just refuse to read them. I'm happier without their clickbaits anyway.

12ft.io almost never works for me tbh.

Also, appending before something is called prepending, similar to how a prefix after something is a suffix.

Definitely don't use uBlock Origin's zapper mode to get rid of elements on the page that are blocking your view.

Doesn't NYT cut off most of the article now? I used to just be able to disable JS but that didn't work anymore last I checked.

Firefox has a button that shows up in the url that kind of turns the webpage into an e-book-esque view that pops up for most articles (especially Pay Wall)

DO NOT DISABLE JAVASCRIPT USING AN EXTENSIONS BECAUSE THAT WILL MAKE TRACKING STOP WORKING AND BYPASS PAYWALLS.

https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

do not right click inspect element on the paywall window and then delete the code & re-enable scrolling (i always forget how to, but don't google it)

the downside is that sometimes half the article is neutered anyway

And God forbid if someone uses archiving sites like archive.is!

Back during prohibition in the US, there was a product called Vine-Glo that was a brick of grape concentrate. It came with a warning: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine."

my browser always asks if I want the simplified view which always bypasses the paywall

12ft hardly works for anything for me anymore

I always break the ctrl key right off my keyboard when I get a new computer so I don't accidentally do this.

"Append...before", AKA "prepend"!

I just hope nobody clicks the reader view button in the top right, it would be just terrible if they got an ad free, paywall free version of the site

You would never use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and then type !archiveis in front of your urlbar visiting a news site.

Absolutely do not inspect elements and start deleting stuff! Leave them alone!