It’s very annoying to click on a link that takes us to an article containing a paywall. Unfortunately we never know it in advance. We generate traffic for the sites, we expose ourselves to advertising and we can’t read the article, it’s a waste of time. It would be nice to have some kind of add-on for browsers that would detect if the links refer to a paid article, and that would warn us before clicking on it by adding via CSS a kind of small symbol in front of the link.

For example: 🛑 https://link.tld

We could imagine that when a user goes to a web page of an article that contains a paywall, he could click on a button of the add-on to report the article, and thus enrich a collectively built database.

  • @jedrax
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    2 years ago

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    • TrollOPM
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      22 years ago

      Yes you are probably right. I’m not a developer but I wonder if web scraping could work. The problem is that the way sites display content under paywall can differ from one media to another, so you would need different scraping methods for each media in this case I guess.

      In the case where it is the users who report the pages under paywall via a small button of the add-on, it is perhaps simpler to do. And I know it already works because I use the SponsorBlock add-on which works a bit like this, but to report sponsored passages in videos.

      https://sponsor.ajay.app/

      • @jedrax
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        2 years ago

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