Ask Lemmy

Many of the articles from those platforms are useless noise, but I do still occasionally want to read something that's posted. When that happens, I just F12 and bypass the paywall, or look for the comment that has the article text, from someone else who has already done that.

Lemmy is not a monolith, quite the opposite in fact.

I don't want moderators to have that power. I do think that users should be able to block posts that link to domains.

filteReddit, a component of Reddit Enhancement Suite, had domain blocks. I'm eagerly awaiting an equivalent to disenshittify Lemmy of paywalled bullshit.

Because it is the original data source which can be used to find non paywall archives using tools such as https://archive.ph/

I think it's always good practice to link the original source.

That's a decision to be made by mods for their own communities.

The ad-supported internet is awful, and paywalls are sort of the only sane alternative. It’s how news has worked for centuries and we need to go back.

I prefer not to link to those, but I still think it's important to link to the original source. Sometimes they're the first to post about it and there's not much way around it (until someone posts a link to an archive version that bypass the paywall, or someone provides an NYT gifted link, etc). So it's either that or we lose the potential for discussion.

There's a community for gifted link articles to NYT right there: [email protected]

1. As far as I know there aren't great moderator tools to automate anything like a pay wall ban, so most mods won't bother inspecting every post.
2. Lots of people like to bypass pay walls, because fuck em.
3. Most people aren't reading the articles anyway.

Because journalism costs money, and journalists have bills to pay. If you don't want to pay money for news, some billionaire will happily pay it for you: https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo

That's up to the specific community on that specific instance.

FYI: Firefox has several plugins that can bypass paywalls. I haven't encountered a link that hasn't worked with the one I got ("Bypass Paywalls Clean").

A paywall for journalism is just as legitimate as a paywall for any other kind of product or service that costs money to produce.

Suggested compromise: keep the original link (this helps the publisher) and include a relevant excerpt from the paywalled article - not the whole article, but enough to allow an informed discussion on it. Encourage readers to subscribe if they can afford it. Most publishers will be happy with that.

Which bring me to this: Why does no one thought about blocking hard paywalled articles for the sake of quality of discussion?

Why block (aka, censor) a link?

1. People are free to subscribe if they want to, they at least get a link to the source.
2. People can often find workarounds if they can't/refuse to pay but they would still need the link to know what exact ref they should search for.

Each community has it's own rules.

Many of us have access to pay walled media, so why block it for everyone?

nothing at all is universally "blocked on Lemmy", different instances + communities set rules that apply there, that is kinda the point of it all...

If you think this is a good idea for a specific community, ask its moderators to create and enforce a rule for this, or create a community of your own where you can set any rules you like.