I hadn't heard of this before today, but this is really interesting. I need to read more about it, but if there aren't any hidden "gotchas", this seems like it could be a great way to support a...
I hadn't heard of this before today, but this is really interesting. I need to read more about it, but if there aren't any hidden "gotchas", this seems like it could be a great way to support a lot of the sites I like to read without having to deal with ads/paywalls/trackers or having to buy individual subscriptions.
Here's the list of their current partner sites (not totally sure where the "hundreds of sites" claim I've seen in articles about it is coming from when there are 32 sites here): https://scroll.com/sites
Edit: my Pi-hole apparently blocks static.scroll.com by default, so that's not a great start. I'll have to look at how that ended up on a blocklist.
This feels particularly misleading when a sizable fraction of those 32 sites are owned by a single parent company: And several more are owned by Vox Media:
not totally sure where the "hundreds of sites" claim I've seen in articles about it is coming from when there are 32 sites here
This feels particularly misleading when a sizable fraction of those 32 sites are owned by a single parent company:
G/O Media Inc. is a media company that runs Gizmodo, Kotaku, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, The Root, The A.V. Club, Clickhole and The Onion
Yeah, though the media industry is pretty consolidated, so that's not really a big surprise. I think it bodes well that they've managed to get some of those major networks to try it out initially,...
Yeah, though the media industry is pretty consolidated, so that's not really a big surprise. I think it bodes well that they've managed to get some of those major networks to try it out initially, at least.
Apparently this is the full list of the "300+ sites": https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2f7c0c8 So it's actually 31 sites + 304 "SBNation.com Blogs". The page on the...
So it's actually 31 sites + 304 "SBNation.com Blogs". The page on the official site only shows one of these, ninersnation.com. Not very impressive, and quite misleading of them to be telling press "300+".
Edit: alright, because I was curious, here's the full list of sites split up by who owns them, as far as I can tell. Sites marked with a * are ones that are shown on https://scroll.com/sites but not included in the linked gist (I'm not sure what that means, if anything):
Click to view owner/site lists
G/O Media
avclub.com
deadspin.com
gizmodo.com
jalopnik.com
jezebel.com
kotaku.com
lifehacker.com
theroot.com
thetakeout.com
clickhole.com
theonion.com
theinventory.com
splinternews.com
Vox Media
curbed.com
eater.com
polygon.com
recode.net
sbnation.com
theverge.com
vox.com
racked.com - defunct site, stopped publishing on this domain in Sept. 2018
I really like the idea of this. I've had a read through their privacy policy and it looks relatively benign. (I'm not a lawyer so any lawyers in the room are welcome to tell me otherwise) I would...
I really like the idea of this. I've had a read through their privacy policy and it looks relatively benign. (I'm not a lawyer so any lawyers in the room are welcome to tell me otherwise)
I would worry about the presence of the scroll cookie just becoming another way for advertising companies to fingerprint you though.
Like you said, it IS interesting that their static content server is being Piholed.
Have you seen the pricing anywhere? I couldn't find it.
Scroll sounds like the online tipjar that Flattr and Brave tried to be but utterly flopped at. There were a lot of problems with its competitors that I fear Scroll will bump into. Flattr relied...
Scroll sounds like the online tipjar that Flattr and Brave tried to be but utterly flopped at. There were a lot of problems with its competitors that I fear Scroll will bump into.
Brave on the other hand took a different approach by having in-built ad blocking in their browser that holds advertisers and content creators to ransom by making them sign up for their own ad platform, where users can voluntarily choose to view Brave's own curated ads for a cut of revenue - which just so happens to be in the form of a wannabe BTC shitcoin and has all the downsides of other cryptocurrencies, like being complicated to the typical end user, requiring secure backup to prevent theft and being unstable in terms of its real world value.
Also, when uBlock Origin and AdBlock Plus exist, who the hell is going to pay $5 a month to block ads? What does Scroll honestly deliver over arguably superior ad and tracker blocking browser addons?
I would, because I want these sites to continue to exist and their writers to get paid for writing the articles that I read almost every day. I subscribe to multiple sites/services and pay for...
Also, when uBlock Origin and AdBlock Plus exist, who the hell is going to pay $5 a month to block ads? What does Scroll honestly deliver over arguably superior ad and tracker blocking browser addons?
I would, because I want these sites to continue to exist and their writers to get paid for writing the articles that I read almost every day. I subscribe to multiple sites/services and pay for lots of things that I could get for free. The Verge article also specifically addresses this question:
The difficult part will be getting readers to sign up. People are used to reading the web for free, and — even if they don’t like it — everyone expects ads across the web. Some people turn to ad blocking, but most just let it go.
Haile thinks the better experience will ultimately win out. “It was kind of the same question Spotify had: ‘why would anyone pay for this when you had Limewire and Napster,’” he said. “It worked out pretty well for them.”
I agree with this sentiment. The problem I have is how many times I've seen these types of companies screw over users in this exact situation. They put up a pop-over pleading with you to turn off...
I would, because I want these sites to continue to exist and their writers to get paid for writing the articles that I read almost every day.
I agree with this sentiment. The problem I have is how many times I've seen these types of companies screw over users in this exact situation. They put up a pop-over pleading with you to turn off your ad blocker, you do, and you end up with malware on your computer from their ads. I also don't trust them not to track me even when they say they won't. So until they can build that trust, I'll continue blocking ads or getting my content elsewhere.
edited to add: I just noticed this on their site:
80% fewer trackers
Yeah, that's not few enough. I need 0% trackers. Seriously, I'm just reading an article, you don't need to or deserve to know anything about me. You were making plenty of money when we all had to buy your content in physical form, paying cash to the vendor down the street and you knew literally nothing about us. Why do you suddenly need to know everything about me?
Spotify added a lot of value and convenience here though. It brought instant streaming, always available, guaranteed legitimate tracks, high quality, additional images and data about tracks,...
“It was kind of the same question Spotify had: ‘why would anyone pay for this when you had Limewire and Napster,’” he said. “It worked out pretty well for them.”
Spotify added a lot of value and convenience here though. It brought instant streaming, always available, guaranteed legitimate tracks, high quality, additional images and data about tracks, legal, etc while also paying (at least something to) the creators. This was significantly better than pre-downloading things you might want, hoping someone was sharing the track you want, only finding out after download if it's a legit and decent quality version, hunting down album art and info separately, worrying about legal letters showing up, not supporting the creators at all. Further, Spotify offers all of this for free with ads, hooking end users on the service before trying to convince them to pay.
Here, the effective legal (afaik) and end user experience barely changes compared to the dead-simple free ad blockers already available. Sure, paying the creators is good and noble, but that alone doesn't usually move the masses, especially when doing so is more expensive.
I'm hitting enough paywalls and article limits nowadays that I'd happily pay for the convenience of making them go away. I'm morally in favour of paying for journalism anyway, but we need some...
I'm hitting enough paywalls and article limits nowadays that I'd happily pay for the convenience of making them go away. I'm morally in favour of paying for journalism anyway, but we need some kind of aggregated payment.
I don't read "a paper", even in digital form, so there's minimal incentive for me to pick up a subscription to one outlet when my reading takes the form of 2-5 articles per month from each source, covering maybe 10 major outlets. With the prevalence of aggregators and social sharing in general, I don't think I'm especially unusual in that kind of reading pattern.
Frustrating as they are, I don't blame the NYT, Bloomberg, etc. for going fairly hard on the paywalls nowadays; I just want a single payment, universal login that makes them all accessible again.
Yeah, unfortunately I did some more reading about Scroll last night, and it turns out it's not going to get you past paywalls on their partner sites. So for partner sites with a paywall (like The...
Yeah, unfortunately I did some more reading about Scroll last night, and it turns out it's not going to get you past paywalls on their partner sites. So for partner sites with a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're supposed to have both a subscription and Scroll to get a "clean" experience.
This article about it also includes the CEO saying that it doesn't sound like The New York Times plans to implement it, even though they're one of the investors:
The New York Times is an investor but not yet a participant. They “are doing so well, they can wait and see how it goes,” Haile said. “They don’t need to change their (digital) business model.”
That would have been one of the main sites I would have been interested in. Overall I've lost most of my initial enthusiasm about Scroll as I found out more about the details, even though I still really like the concept.
Yeah, I went through the same thing for a bit and mentioned it offhandedly in one of my edits: There are several of their domains in some ad/tracker block lists, probably because they've got...
Yeah, I went through the same thing for a bit and mentioned it offhandedly in one of my edits:
Edit: my Pi-hole apparently blocks static.scroll.com by default, so that's not a great start. I'll have to look at how that ended up on a blocklist.
There are several of their domains in some ad/tracker block lists, probably because they've got scripts/cookies on all of their partner sites for how they implemented this.
So in my understanding I would have to enable third party cookies to be able to sign in into scroll through another website ? Hmm this is a difficult prerequisite to accept... I have many other...
How does it work?
Scroll isn’t a browser extension and you don’t just get the Scroll experience in our app. Scroll integrates directly into sites so that they can always recognize you and deliver a Scroll-enabled experience. Once you’re logged in to Scroll in a browser, you’ll automatically get the experience of a better internet.
So in my understanding I would have to enable third party cookies to be able to sign in into scroll through another website ? Hmm this is a difficult prerequisite to accept...
I have many other reasons to not subscribe to such service, but this implementation is simply at a technical level against good practices countering bad behavior of ads networks
I think a big difference is that the Scroll subscription model is well understood by consumers, and it allows them to continue using their preferred browser of choice. There's no mystery to...
I think a big difference is that the Scroll subscription model is well understood by consumers, and it allows them to continue using their preferred browser of choice. There's no mystery to it—you're paying a subscription fee for content access. That's really quite conventional.
The Brave model on the other hand is not close to conventional, and it requires a download in the form of a web browser to work properly. There's no way that's reasonably going to scale to the point where it makes a meaningful difference to the current status quo. General Joe Bloggs doesn't care if Brendan Eich is behind the project or not.[1]
[1]: I respect they're making an attempt though, I just don't see it working out.
I hadn't heard of this before today, but this is really interesting. I need to read more about it, but if there aren't any hidden "gotchas", this seems like it could be a great way to support a lot of the sites I like to read without having to deal with ads/paywalls/trackers or having to buy individual subscriptions.
Here's the list of their current partner sites (not totally sure where the "hundreds of sites" claim I've seen in articles about it is coming from when there are 32 sites here): https://scroll.com/sites
Edit: my Pi-hole apparently blocks static.scroll.com by default, so that's not a great start. I'll have to look at how that ended up on a blocklist.
This feels particularly misleading when a sizable fraction of those 32 sites are owned by a single parent company:
And several more are owned by Vox Media:
Yeah, though the media industry is pretty consolidated, so that's not really a big surprise. I think it bodes well that they've managed to get some of those major networks to try it out initially, at least.
While looking around their site more, I noticed that at the bottom of the Team page it shows that they're funded by the New York Times, among some other media companies. So hopefully that means that the NYT and some of the other sites owned by those companies will become part of it before long too.
Apparently this is the full list of the "300+ sites": https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2f7c0c8
So it's actually 31 sites + 304 "SBNation.com Blogs". The page on the official site only shows one of these, ninersnation.com. Not very impressive, and quite misleading of them to be telling press "300+".
Edit: alright, because I was curious, here's the full list of sites split up by who owns them, as far as I can tell. Sites marked with a
*are ones that are shown on https://scroll.com/sites but not included in the linked gist (I'm not sure what that means, if anything):Click to view owner/site lists
G/O Media
Vox Media
Axel Springer SE
BuzzFeed
Chris Richmond & Drew Schoentrup
Alpha Brand Media
Emerson Collective
Graham Holdings Company
Gannett Company
Independent?
Not even a site?
I really like the idea of this. I've had a read through their privacy policy and it looks relatively benign. (I'm not a lawyer so any lawyers in the room are welcome to tell me otherwise)
I would worry about the presence of the scroll cookie just becoming another way for advertising companies to fingerprint you though.
Like you said, it IS interesting that their static content server is being Piholed.
Have you seen the pricing anywhere? I couldn't find it.
It's on their homepage but omitted from the announcement blog post - $5/month with a "6 months for 50% off" introductory offer.
Scroll sounds like the online tipjar that Flattr and Brave tried to be but utterly flopped at. There were a lot of problems with its competitors that I fear Scroll will bump into.
Flattr relied too much on pushing community goodwill and hit the roadblock that many people aren't going to pay for shit that they can already get for free without any significant downsides.
Brave on the other hand took a different approach by having in-built ad blocking in their browser that holds advertisers and content creators to ransom by making them sign up for their own ad platform, where users can voluntarily choose to view Brave's own curated ads for a cut of revenue - which just so happens to be in the form of a wannabe BTC shitcoin and has all the downsides of other cryptocurrencies, like being complicated to the typical end user, requiring secure backup to prevent theft and being unstable in terms of its real world value.
As for Scroll, they have a surprising amount of major publishers on board and seem to be taking the premium ad and tracker blocking approach. But they don't seem to have as many partner websites as Brave Ads does. Unless this is actually not the complete and exhaustive list of sites on board.
Also, when uBlock Origin and AdBlock Plus exist, who the hell is going to pay $5 a month to block ads? What does Scroll honestly deliver over arguably superior ad and tracker blocking browser addons?
I would, because I want these sites to continue to exist and their writers to get paid for writing the articles that I read almost every day. I subscribe to multiple sites/services and pay for lots of things that I could get for free. The Verge article also specifically addresses this question:
I agree with this sentiment. The problem I have is how many times I've seen these types of companies screw over users in this exact situation. They put up a pop-over pleading with you to turn off your ad blocker, you do, and you end up with malware on your computer from their ads. I also don't trust them not to track me even when they say they won't. So until they can build that trust, I'll continue blocking ads or getting my content elsewhere.
edited to add: I just noticed this on their site:
Yeah, that's not few enough. I need 0% trackers. Seriously, I'm just reading an article, you don't need to or deserve to know anything about me. You were making plenty of money when we all had to buy your content in physical form, paying cash to the vendor down the street and you knew literally nothing about us. Why do you suddenly need to know everything about me?
Spotify added a lot of value and convenience here though. It brought instant streaming, always available, guaranteed legitimate tracks, high quality, additional images and data about tracks, legal, etc while also paying (at least something to) the creators. This was significantly better than pre-downloading things you might want, hoping someone was sharing the track you want, only finding out after download if it's a legit and decent quality version, hunting down album art and info separately, worrying about legal letters showing up, not supporting the creators at all. Further, Spotify offers all of this for free with ads, hooking end users on the service before trying to convince them to pay.
Here, the effective legal (afaik) and end user experience barely changes compared to the dead-simple free ad blockers already available. Sure, paying the creators is good and noble, but that alone doesn't usually move the masses, especially when doing so is more expensive.
I'm hitting enough paywalls and article limits nowadays that I'd happily pay for the convenience of making them go away. I'm morally in favour of paying for journalism anyway, but we need some kind of aggregated payment.
I don't read "a paper", even in digital form, so there's minimal incentive for me to pick up a subscription to one outlet when my reading takes the form of 2-5 articles per month from each source, covering maybe 10 major outlets. With the prevalence of aggregators and social sharing in general, I don't think I'm especially unusual in that kind of reading pattern.
Frustrating as they are, I don't blame the NYT, Bloomberg, etc. for going fairly hard on the paywalls nowadays; I just want a single payment, universal login that makes them all accessible again.
Yeah, unfortunately I did some more reading about Scroll last night, and it turns out it's not going to get you past paywalls on their partner sites. So for partner sites with a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're supposed to have both a subscription and Scroll to get a "clean" experience.
This article about it also includes the CEO saying that it doesn't sound like The New York Times plans to implement it, even though they're one of the investors:
That would have been one of the main sites I would have been interested in. Overall I've lost most of my initial enthusiasm about Scroll as I found out more about the details, even though I still really like the concept.
Is it just me, or is the Scroll homepage not loading any kind of stylesheet at all. I've tried three different browsers and two devices without luck.
Yeah, I went through the same thing for a bit and mentioned it offhandedly in one of my edits:
There are several of their domains in some ad/tracker block lists, probably because they've got scripts/cookies on all of their partner sites for how they implemented this.
So in my understanding I would have to enable third party cookies to be able to sign in into scroll through another website ? Hmm this is a difficult prerequisite to accept...
I have many other reasons to not subscribe to such service, but this implementation is simply at a technical level against good practices countering bad behavior of ads networks
I think a big difference is that the Scroll subscription model is well understood by consumers, and it allows them to continue using their preferred browser of choice. There's no mystery to it—you're paying a subscription fee for content access. That's really quite conventional.
The Brave model on the other hand is not close to conventional, and it requires a download in the form of a web browser to work properly. There's no way that's reasonably going to scale to the point where it makes a meaningful difference to the current status quo. General Joe Bloggs doesn't care if Brendan Eich is behind the project or not.[1]
[1]: I respect they're making an attempt though, I just don't see it working out.