🚨🚨🚨DEFINITELY DO NOT DO THIS HIGHLY ILLEGAL🚨🚨🚨 - eviltoast

You will go straight to jail 😡😡😡

  • abbenm@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    edit-2
    7 days ago

    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.