67
votes
Can we maybe have an informal agreement to avoid posting articles that require you to sell your firstborn child to the devil just to read them?
Around half of the articles I click here are hidden behind cookie walls where you have to accept all cookies, or you won't be able to read them at all. And it's getting extremely annoying. Like, no. I do not want to click that, and the stupid websites are not even giving me a real alternative.
Example: the guardian made this change around a month back. Now, you accept all cookies etc. or pay.
Can we please try to avoid that in the future by posting from other sources, if other sources are available for the same topic?
Original reporting is often only available from the original source. I believe we should support original reporting.
Those creating original reporting need to make money off their original reporting or they cannot afford to make original reporting. If we aren't paying up front, that means giving them data or eyeballs on ads.
Good, independent news is more important than ever. I think we should agree to only post original sources.
If I choose not to accept the "terms" of the original source or it isn't even available in my country due to cookie laws/regulations, I believe it's on me to find an alternative source, not on those who take their time to share good content with us.
Yeah this is a hard no for me. If you're too lazy to open the comments to check for a an archive link, you're too lazy to be engaging with the post.
Not only is supporting the few good journalist outlets left crucial, its increasingly a key part of ensuring its accurate.
Okay but here's what's going to happen: I'm going to see the bullshit cookies required, decline them, be blocked from reading the website and be prompted to pay $$$ after the website just told me to go fuck myself, so I'm going to decline to pay. I'm going to either A) not read the article and just take a guess based off the title and thread comments, or B) go click an archived link that bypasses the paywall.
In either situation I'm not going to support them. So, which do you want me to do? The one where I contribute to the conversation more ignorantly, or the one where I pirate the article?
The problem here is that market systems only work when the buyer internalizes the costs/benefits in an emotionally impactful way, whereas articles are more of an "eat your veggies" sort of thing and thus their hardballing has no emotional grounding.
You do also have a choice to not contribute more "ignorantly" that is not a foregone conclusion.
There's a difficulty in this discussion more broadly in that some folks don't have a problem with cookies so it's not selling their child's soul or whatever, others have them blocked, still others will not see them due to different experiences depending on what country someone is in, etc.
I try to use NYT gift links for example, but as a subscriber (for free from my job, fuck them getting my money) who uses the app I have no idea what the web experience currently looks like.
But I don't understand "post better sources or else I'll reply ignorantly" as the two options.
That is reasonable from an individual perspective, but from a systems perspective, if 100 people click the link, 50 bounce, 40 are fine with cookies, and 10 are paying subscribers, that’s still supporting original sourced journalism much more significantly than a secondary source.
Put in the minimum amount of effort to find an alternative source for the story that meets your needs. Don't put this burden on everybody else.
And feel free to share it in the comments! It's useful and encourages discussion when people share multiple related links.
Um, what? If it's a paywalled article the only alternative is bypassing the paywall. An alternative article is a different article, which while possibly informative is irrelevant to a discussion of the original article (although obviously useful for the broader discussion).
What does your comment even mean?
You asked "which do you want me to do" as if this decision is incumbent upon "us" or at least on @nacho
It's not. Follow your own morality, or your whim, or whatever. Nacho believes people, broadly, should support original reporting. And you're taking this as some sort of challenge - you dislike the cookies strongly enough that you're going to click an archive link, ok cool. Then do that?
Like genuinely, their statement isn't a personal judgement of your actions. Demanding they tell you to either "pirate" the article (or whatever you qualify the archive link as) or "take a guess based off the title" and contribute more ignorantly" is bizarre.
As for what the comment above you means is that if you want to read a different article on the topic at hand, you can go do that. You can even add that link to the thread if you wanted. That would absolutely be relevant to that thread.
But it seems like you're taking this statement of belief as a challenge to your behavior. And I don't think any of us care about your article reading other than in the most abstract aggregate and we can't control it anyway. So like, do what you want. But everyone here isn't fighting you.
Bleh, I've made a mess. I don't think anyone is personally fighting me, but I do think lots of people are missing my point (which is at least partially my fault TBF) and that's really frustrating.
Let me throw out some of what I've previously said and try again:
There's this problem in communities like Tildes, where if people don't engage in comments then the community dies, because a community is just a self-sustaining series of comments that attracts more people to read and post comments. Take a look at half of Lemmy; articles but no comments, or maybe 1-3 comments but nothing that ignites ongoing discussion. People need to post, and if a hypothetical person's ideology frequently concludes with "well then don't comment" then they're going to end up with a dead community.
Any functional ideology within these discussion boards ought to result in people commenting. If the ideology of your community basically stops people from commenting, then people won't comment and the ideology is moot, because people will go elsewhere with a more functional ideology.
And so, if one's conclusion on paywalled articles is "well then you should pay money and/or accept invasive ads from companies that have a history of permitting malware in their ads, before you comment" then again, people just won't, and you end up with a dead community. In the worst case scenario, everyone just switches to Reddit.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that any ideology that fails to grapple with real-world behavior is a dead ideology, "nice idea, wrong species" style. And I'm trying to challenge the ideology presented.
So there are four options here:
You can imagine how I'd ignore #1, as per above.
#2 is a workaround for #4 but avoiding the explicitly demanded payment - it's literally piracy, I don't see how anyone could seriously argue choosing option #2 is anything but piracy. I don't know why you have quotes around the word "pirate".
The "more ignorantly" comment refers to #3 - commenting without directly reading the original article (even if you read all alternative sources of information) will always be more ignorant than commenting with directly reading the original article. It's not commenting ignorantly, but it is commenting more ignorantly, no matter how you slice it.
Maybe some people consider #4 a serious option - the sort of people who doesn't even have an ad blocker - but I basically didn't think about them because of how ubiquitous and easy
archive.isis.Ironically, since we're (I'm?) concerned about commenting in general, nacho's choices and my own are both (almost) irrelevant; what matters is how the majority choose.
Because a lot of people would object to the use of the term, so I hedged rather than have to discuss the matter.
...And yet, here we are. ¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯
Your point was likely missed because of your previous framing. I don't personally feel the same way about a lot of it. But any weighting where 3 is inherently a better option than 1 is off, in my opinion.
Regardless if you're wanting to have this bigger picture conversation I'm going back to #1 and not commenting. Not because I agree or disagree but because I personally don't have the spoons for it. I do encourage you to post this as a top level if you want conversation as I doubt you get as much attention this far down and I'm just too tired. No shade, just tired.
I can think of some additional options:
If you're sufficiently curious about the topic, do a news search and see if you can find a better article that way. (That is, someone else didn't do it, but you still can.) Assuming you can tell what to search for from the headline. Alternately:
Ask someone to post a quote from the article summarizing it. (We don't post full articles, though.)
I don't think we can get everyone to agree on a policy, but improving topics can be a group effort with a bit of encouragement.
I'm assuming everyone does this - the point is that a "better article" often has different sources and takes and such, and if two different people use two different articles while treating them the same, they can end up thoroughly miscommunicating due to not sharing a reality. And reading a better article doesn't actually change the dilemma of whether to read the original article or not, and if it's okay to comment after only reading the alternative better articles but not the original title article.
Maybe the way to go would be to write something like, “I couldn’t read the original article, but here’s another one I found” and that part of the conversation will be in its own subtree?
I mean, the vast majority of articles with paywalls on Tildes have links to archive.is already in the comments before I get there. So I think in terms of the preferences of the rest of Tildes, the answer is pretty clear.
I've honestly just started clicking accept on cookies for sites that I like or news I'm actually consuming. I just think of it as paying in a currency they want (my data). It's not my version of an ideal currency but it's what the world seems to have decided on. I'm much more worried about the deeper systemic tracking issues of the internet and things like the fact that I'm forced to use gmail and google drive for work these days than a few measly cookies that will get purged at the end of a session. Besides my data is pretty useless, I make it a point to buy as little online as humanly possible.
IMO a site's cookie policies is not a strong enough reason for removing it from the potential submission pool here. And IMO source quality matters a hell of a lot more than most other considerations, especially when there are plenty of options for users to deal with both cookies and paywalls, if they find those annoying.
Don't like dealing with cookies or their consent popups? Use an extension/add-on to handle the popups automatically like Consent-O-Matic, and a privacy focused browser that can clear cookies after each session like Firefox Focus or even base Firefox (Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Cookies and Site Data -> Manage Exceptions, then add said websites as 'Allow for Session').
Don't like paywalls? Filter out the
paywalltag so you never have to see them here, or wait for someone to post an archive link in the comments, or use archive.today/.is/.ph yourself, or use an extension like bypass paywalls clean.As for the idea of using tags to make distinctions between the various types of paywalls, we actually used to use
paywall.softandpaywall.hardbut the problem with that is the paywalls landscape has gotten infinitely more complicated over the years, and it's also constantly shifting too. A few "hard" paywalls are globally applied and easy to notice (e.g. Financial Times), but most are semi-permeable paywalls of various sorts. Some are geolocation based and applied only to users from certain regions, some are 'metered' allowing individual users X free articles a week/month, and most are a combination of a whole bunch of different methods (including referrer tracking, paywalling or unpaywalling articles X hours/days after initial publication, only paywalling articles that they publish in print form but not their digital only content, etc, etc, etc, etc). And it's simply waaaaaaaay too much work to try to keep track of all that, especially since its exceptionally rare for companies to publicly declare how their paywall actually works or announce when they change things about it. Which is why we ultimately had to do away with the Soft vs Hard paywall distinction, and just rely onpaywallfor all of them.And now people also want us to try to keep track of cookie consent popups, how strict their policies are, and add tags to accurately reflect that too? Uhhhh, yeah, that's probably not going to happen... unless someone here wants to volunteer to do that themselves. ;)
Minor correction: it's not about cookies actually, at all. Cookies are an implementation detail. Those popups are asking for your consent to being tracked by the site, which can come in various forms and technical implementations. Calling it "cookies" misses the point. It can mean gathering your data, correlating it with data from other sources, using it to determine strategy to adjust your views, selling it to the american government - anything.
Fair point, but even if you replace 'cookie' with 'tracking' my comment wouldn't change. I still think it's not a strong enough reason to restrict certain news sources from being submitted here. And from a practical perspective there unfortunately still isn't much we can realistically do to help people filter out every site based on that criteria, at least not with one overarching tag. But if someone truly objects to a particular site and its cookie/tracking policies, and feels strongly enough about it that they never want to see that site submitted here, they can always filter it out individually using
source.<sitename>. E.g. In this case, by addingsource.the guardianto their filter settings.To go one step deeper into tracking paranoia, tracking is visible because websites usually try to do things legally and get informed consent. A website that didn't care about the law could use browser fingerprinting, perhaps even server-side only, and you'd never know what they were tracking. So, it's sort of on the honor system.
The harms seem pretty invisible too, though? While It's probably happened somewhere, it's pretty hard to come up with specific examples about how someone has been harmed by being invisibly tracked with web technologies.
I'm not sure this is worth bothering with unless you have a specific reason to believe a government might be trying to track you.
A simple, partial countermeasure might be to create a separate browser profile just for Tildes and any websites you visit from Tildes. I don't think it entirely prevents fingerprinting, but maybe it helps?
If a government wants you, they're getting you regardless of your cookie choices. It's almost impossible to avoid high-level targetted digital surveillance (which, to be clear, ad tracking is absolutely nothing like). Although a malicious regime could just as easily make up whatever evidence they want even if you never so much as power up your computer, let alone read a webpage.
Having once done all the paranoid "privacy" stuff at one time and now do almost exactly none of it, there has been basically zero negative changes in my everyday browsing experience and a few positives. I don't mind seeing adverts because that's how a lot of websites make money and without money they will no longer provide entertainment for me, so that seems like a fair exchange. Eyeballs for cash is an acceptable transaction for me.
If I'm seeing ads I might as well see ads for the kind of things I prefer to see. No booze, no gambling is nice to be able to choose. For a while I convinced the algorithms that I was interested in buying underwear, so I had pictures of beautiful people of various shapes, sizes, ages and genders all wearing tiny items of clothing adorning the web pages I visited. That was very much a positive on accepting cookies.
I'd argue that everyday browsing was never the value prop of securing your personal data. Privacy and security will always be less convenient. Privacy is one of those things you don't need until you do, but you can't get back once you've given it up. That goes extra hard at the system level when dealing with entire populations and policies that broadly take away privacy.
I also wouldn't call interspersing my content with non sequiturs about anything to be a positive, but that's just my personal preference. I do see the positive of "if I'm required to look at things I don't want, I'd rather they be things I usually enjoy", but it's very slim to me.
Two of my "favorite" examples of tracking technologies being used to great success: brexit and trump's first election (both by facebook's Cambridge analytica). Though it is probably impossible to determine their degree of successful usage of the tech, what I'm trying to say is that this has profound societal impact - unlikely positive. Saying "it doesn't affect me" is shortsighted.
I’m not sure it’s been proven that Cambridge Analytica had a significant effect on elections? Elections are very noisy and all sorts of things affect voting. I suspect it’s more of a scapegoat.
Also, I’m quite confident that I’m not going to vote for Trump or similar candidates due to an ad. In general, I don’t feel the need to protect myself from the invisible, subtle harms of ads somehow causing brain rot. I’m much more interested in getting rid of ads for the blatantly obvious reason that they annoy me and get in my way, targeted or not. (Which is why I rarely watch TV and pay for ad-free YouTube despite not watching it all that much.)
I think we can say for reasonably sure that aggressive psy-op style advertising (which is a polite way to say blatantly lying on hot-button issues) as deployed by the likes of Farage and Trump has influenced elections. However, that's not the same thing.
It was a fairly open secret when I worked in/around advertising that ultra-targetted ads are really not that useful - at least nowhere near as effective as the ad brokers would have you believe. It's much easier to just blanket bomb demographics/areas with one well-crafted campaign than tailor one ad for 37-43 year old men with beards who have previously liked headphones, yoghurt and garden tools, then another for 23-24 year old women who enjoy purple lipstick, hot sauce and CNC mill repair videos; etc etc.
The reason I will fight in the streets to keep the BBC is not because a free and independent press is vital to democracy, it's because they make radio I can listen to all day long without hearing a single advert. The news bit is important too I guess.
Perhaps targeted advertising is more useful when you want to avoid paying for ads to people who aren’t in the target audience rather than sending different ads to different people?
I do like to do a Google News search and pick the best news article I can find. However, people have different ideas about which article is best. We aren't all equally affected by paywalls, ads and so on. I also don't know which sites have issues with cookies, since it's not an issue for me.
But there is something you can do about it. It took me surprisingly long to get into the habit of pasting the URL into archive.is, because @cfabbro would usually do it and post the link. But it really is very easy and anyone can do it.
Yeah, I’ve always appreciated the equally informal “someone will have posted an archive link by the time I get there” expectation here, and honestly I’d prefer the sources are chosen by the content than by the lack of paywall.
If it’s just a forced cookie banner rather than a hard paywall, opening it in a private window and accepting the cookies is also functionally the same as rejecting them. It’s irritating that we need to, and I get not wanting to support that behaviour, but between that and archive sites there are at least options.
Yep. The only times it's a bit of a PITA is if the mirror doesn't exist yet on archive.today/.is/.ph/etc... in which case you have to sit in queue and then wait for the mirror to be created, which can take anywhere from 5-30min depending on how busy they are. But thankfully these days it's really rare for a mirror of an article from a popular media source to not already exist by the time it gets submitted here. So 99% of the time putting in the article URL just automatically redirects you to that preexisting mirror link, which you can then copy/paste into a comment.
I must admit, cookies and cookie warning popups rarely cross my mind. Browser extensions take care of most of them.
Just a heads up: last time I checked, consent-o-matic did not turn off “legitimate interest” toggles. Aren’t those the real evil consents?
Interesting. Do you know how the other similar extensions compare?
Unfortunately I don’t. When I looked I couldn’t find an alternative that does block those. I hope somebody will swoop in and tell us both!
I would advise to not use extensions that touch elements on the page if you also use ublock origin: https://nitter.net/gorhill/status/1033706103782170625
There is already good filters built-in against these cookies notice in the filter-list:
You should configure your browser to clear all cookies on shutdown. If you use a password manager, logging into your account is a matter of a single shortcut press, so it's barely an inconvenience. It's only inconvenient for sites with 2FA that you use very often, but you can add those as an exception from cookie clearing.
That’s good advice too. Although that still means you have to do something while browsing, those cookie popups will still be there and the cookies also while the browser is open. On second thought, how often do you close the browser? On my devices, the browser is only closed when the device needs a reboot or when Firefox requires a restart. Uptime on my laptop is usually weeks, if not months.
A much better addition is by @d32 in another topic:
I wouldn't want to discourage people from posting an article for discussion because of it, though I would appreciate a tag to mark the site as controlled content so I don't waste my time since I'm never going to agree to those sites terms.
I really do appreciate when somebody quotes the important parts of articles in comments though, I wish that was done more often.
You can filter out the "paywall" tag, if you choose.
Sure, though that doesn't cover sites that require you agree to sell your viewing data.
Also, I might want to read comments from the post on tildes. It's just nice to know if I'm wasting my time if I click the link to the source.
Unfortunately, journalists have to eat, too, so your choices are data harvesting or subscription fees (or both, f*ck newsletters with tracking and ads) if you want quality original content.
I would love a workable micropayment system so that I can see the good stuff I'm interested in without also subsidizing all the sports, lifestyle, business fluffing, and opinion filler. But we can't have nice things.
It’s dangerous to browse alone. Take this.
It removes all the floating bullshit content off the page and almost never breaks desired functionality. Most of the time those cookie blockers are just floating on top of content so this should kill it without needing to accept anything.
I agree with most others here that this on its own shouldn't be a reason to exclude an article from submission -- but since it's relevant, I have a question about these cookie popups:
I remember hearing that the cookie popups that require you to accept all cookies or pay a subscription fee are in violation of EU law but that it's just not being enforced well. I'm in the EU myself and I have noticed these most often on websites from my home country. Does anybody here know if what I've heard is true or if I'm misremembering something else and these popups are actually totally fine legally? It doesn't make much difference practically for me since they show up anyway, but I'm curious.
My understanding is that the "pay or consent" model was not originally meant to be legal, but news orgs started doing it because they would lose money otherwise. Meta got slapped down hard by the EU for trying it, with the claim that there is no true consent freely given in a "pay or consent" model for the big players.
Each "pay or consent" instance will be evaluated on a case by case basis to determine the power dynamics of the user and that business. But as far as I can tell, the EU hasn't actually gone after any of the news orgs? I suppose in theory that a user could just not read Spiegel or whatever, but in practice there aren't that many news sources these days of that caliber. To me, a non-social media user, the monopoly that news organizations have is just as strong as the monopoly that Meta has.
This is, in my opinion, an example of the EU regulating based on too-specific outcomes desired rather than building a correct and logical framework that is fair for all participants.
I suspect the Meta case is what I initially read about regarding this issue, thanks.
Yeah and just to note I originally wrote DW but I think they don't have a pay or consent model afaict. I might have been thinking Spiegel so I changed it. I'm not sure if either source is actually good; I was just annoyed by the pop-up. :)
yeah iirc DW is still accessible without this which is nice
It's also technically illegal to have cookie popups that require more clicks to reject all cookies than to accept them. But good luck trying to get your country's DPA to do anything about that.
Maybe the German one is better, but the Dutch GPA is taking months to process my complaint about a website blatantly refusing to process by GDPR request to delete my information. And that's a complaint about my own data, while a complaint about a cookie banner would be considered a "rip-off" that they don't even have to process or respond to in any way.
I definitely wouldn't put any money on the German one being better lol
Today I saw one of those "accept or subscribe" popups for the first time. That is kinda fucked up, isn't it? And my GDPR popup extension of choice didn't close it either, probably because there's no decline button. Really hoping this doesn't become a big trend.
Yeah, they're pretty awful. I see them much more often when I browse German websites than English ones, they've become pretty popular here.
I like cookie remover for this sort of thing. Combined with bypass paywalls, it works well.
Consentomatic is fine.. but I'd rather manually accept then immediately purge.
What's the point of using an extension for that? Doesn't Firefox already let you do that by clicking the shield icon?
I don't think so -- and if it does, it isn't as fast. Firefox should provide a quick cookie ditch and that would be a perfect spot for it.
It's in the padlock, right next to the shield!
Other locations:
Page Info (CTRL+I or Alt, Tools > Page Info or Padlock > Connection secure > More information) under Security;
Developer tools (F12 or CTRL+Shift+I) under Storage (more fine grained control);
For a quick, configurable global cleanup use CTRL+Shift+Del.
That said I also have it in the cookie manager extension I have installed (Cookie Quick Manager).
nice! so many options, too.
Perhaps an icon similar to what shows in Kagi search for domains with paywalls or overall invasive cookie demands? It would let people at a glance determine (or maybe filter) out sites they don't want to click.
One of my favorite features of Kagi is to deprioritize or block certain domains.
An icon is probably a no-go, but people can suggest a tag, and then people can filter by tags.
Tagging is almost certainly the solution here - we shouldn't let one person's (or even multiple people's) preferences for the content they consume dictate the content that I can consume on the site. But there are already tools in place that would allow for people to not see the kinds of content they don't want to see, and those tools are tagging, so if we can come up with a valid tag that can be implemented that captures this, then it's a fait accompli.
Probably pretty easy to create a local script with greasemonkey (or whatever people use today) that adds an icon based on a tag as well.
Oh for sure - if people really want an icon for paywalls or cookie nightmares, they can definitely roll their own.
I would be for a software enforced rule requiring a 4 sentence summary of all video links posted.