Scott’s new post on Problems With Paywalls reminds me to mention the one weird trick I use to get around paywalls. Many places like NYT will make the paywall appear a few seconds after landing on the page, so I reliably hit cmd-a and cmd-c and then paste the whole post into a text editor, and read it there instead of on the site. This works for the majority of paywalled articles I encounter personally.
If you use Firefox, there is an extension called Temporary Containers. This allows you to load a site in a temporary container tab, which is effectively like opening the site in a fresh install of a browser or on a new device. For sites with rate limited pay walls like the NYT, this effectively defeats the paywall as it never appears to them that you have gone over their rate limit.
The extension can be configured so that every instance of a particular url is automatically opened in its own temporary container, which defeats these paywalls at very little cost to convenience.
Scott’s new post on Problems With Paywalls reminds me to mention the one weird trick I use to get around paywalls. Many places like NYT will make the paywall appear a few seconds after landing on the page, so I reliably hit cmd-a and cmd-c and then paste the whole post into a text editor, and read it there instead of on the site. This works for the majority of paywalled articles I encounter personally.
Or you can use Bypass Paywalls with Firefox or Chrome.
Experimenting with this now!
If you use Firefox, there is an extension called Temporary Containers. This allows you to load a site in a temporary container tab, which is effectively like opening the site in a fresh install of a browser or on a new device. For sites with rate limited pay walls like the NYT, this effectively defeats the paywall as it never appears to them that you have gone over their rate limit.
The extension can be configured so that every instance of a particular url is automatically opened in its own temporary container, which defeats these paywalls at very little cost to convenience.
You can often find articles in the Wayback Machine even if they’re paywalled.