Asshole Design

Eh? That's a paywall. NYT thinks their content is valuable enough that people pay money, plus that they offer a limited amount of free reading to convince potential customers. There's nothing assholish in that.

It's a contagious shit show.

@Fast-Nop Locking a “free” article behind a registration is assholish as fuck. You can’t change my mind.

@C0D4 Fuck these shits. Let’s get our daily dose of news from Reddit.

@Cyanide and what exactly makes this a free article?
If someone put the work in to write an article they should have the right to sell access at a price they choose. If you don’t want to pay that price thats fine but it doesnt make them an asshole

@Cyanide They'e not interested in showing you free articles, they want to sell you a subscription. That's called "business". Like in, "earning money with one's products".

The threshold from reading free articles without subscription to registering and subscribing involves two steps. Moving the registration one step forward makes the actual subscription only one step, so that makes sense.

What they lose is people who don't want to subscribe and don't want to register, but guess what: the NYT has decided that these people don't make them enough money anyway.

Open in private tab in safari and as soon as it starts to load smash the reader view icon in the search bar. Works on most sites with paywalls.

@Cyanide I feel like you only get half the news from Reddit, if you know what I mean.

I purposely apply DNS blocking to websites that do this.

Fuck em, that's why.

@wackOverflow That means that they still load in the full article, and just slap the overlay on top client-side... If that's true then damn, that's the shittiest implementation I've ever seen of a "paywall"

@Fast-Nop so what you're telling me is that the sobs who actually pay are going to have their premiums jacked up every year because less and less people are going to pay for it because they can barely pay for their living space and groceries?

This is only furthered by ignoring that the poor are uneducated about current events and are thus shoved deeper into their dark poor hole because they are unaware of life-changing opportunities. In an effort to continue publishing, the company downsizes thousands of authors and replaces them with AI and still raises subscription fees higher to meet the financial needs of the board of directors bonus scheme. The thousands of authors then become a part of the undulating mass of poor citizens under the shadow of the wealthy.

Then, only the board of directors subscribe and they stop publishing and continue their efforts in attempting to suck each other's geriatric dicks for profit.

This world has more in common with cookie clicker than I realized.

@Fast-Nop what I'm trying to say is

I'll die a poor slave before I suck their dicks for content.

@skylord pretty much. I know business insider does that for sure, and WSJ too. Not sure about NYT but wouldn’t be surprised.

@sariel Do you work for free? No? So why would the NYT folks work for free? If you think their content isn't worth subscribing for money, that's OK, but demanding that they HAVE to give it away for free is... assholish.

Besides, the main reason people struggle to make a living certainly isn't newspaper cost, that's ridiculous - it's the insane housing costs. In other words, not related to the NYT paywall.

@Fast-Nop I'm not expecting them to give everything away for free.

I'm expecting them to pester a person repeatedly while they read the article like you would get at any news stand in the 90s.

I'm expecting them to provide a premium product for a cost. The articles at NYT were written by toddlers. They have no substance and are only overshadowed by the sheer volume of opinion pieces.

Their model is broken, not the market.

@sariel You can conclude that their product is not worth its price for you, that's fine - but demanding money for their product doesn't make them assholes.

Btw., do you notice the contradiction in your criticism? On the one hand, you're complaining that this isn't available for the education of the poor masses, but you also complain that the articles have toddler quality.

Do you really think it would help poor people to be educated by toddlers?

@Fast-Nop quality of education is never guaranteed.

It seems you have mistaken me for someone who actually cares what these companies do. I really don't.

Any company that I disagree with goes on my block list, NYT just so happens to be one of them because of their shitty UX.

@Cyanide

You got a lot of negative comments but I for one also remember the days when news were free. It used to be an essential service to keep people well informed on what's happening in the world and their income usually came from other sources, often by selling paper versions... so now they save money on paper and printing and still ask you for more money than it would've host on paper... 15$ per week? and that's a discount from 65$? You can get netflix access for less than that and let's face it, netflix probably pays a whole lot more for their employees and infrastructure than NYT...

not to mention the site clearly says you can view the article for free even now... you just need to register, which totally is an asshole design, because the articles are supposedly free already... you just can't look at them unless you put your spam folder on the line... weee...

@Hazarth I like how nobody has noticed that it's not dollars. That's 15 INR (Indian rupees) per week discounted from 65 INR. That's about $0.2 per week, discounted from $0.88 per week. Sounds entirely reasonable to me tbh.

@RememberMe We are not talking about the price here, only design. But yeah.. I missed that too.

@RememberMe Oooh, I totally missed that, yes! good catch!

I stand corrected, the price is reasonable. Though I still agree with OP that locking free content behind a regwall (did I just coin this term?) is a bit of a dick move