[reaperducer]

I used to use a similar service called Blendle. It, too, promised ad-free news. But even though I have lots of credit in my account, I stopped using it for three reasons:

1. It had a very limited number of publications available.

2. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear political bias on the part of the curators.

3. Blendle sends out a weekly newsletter with a list of the stories it thinks are the best. It also presented a clearly one-sided view of the world and the stories available from the Blendle publications, accompanied by a TON of editorializing on the part of the newsletter authors.

Instead, I subscribe to several newspapers both in electronic and dead tree editions. I don't mind paying for news. But I want to make up my own mind about the news, and not be force-fed one ideology by a gatekeeper.

Back on topic: I hope that Scroll does better than Blendle. Looking at its list of publications, I only see two that I would read, and only one regularly. If Scroll expands to more interesting content, I'll get on board.

[notatoad]

I also was excited by the promise of Blendle and stopped using it, but for different reasons to you: the main way i consume news is by finding links to articles on twitter and reddit. with blendle, those links didn't take me to the "blendle version" of the article, but to the paywalled version, and there was no easy way to jump from the paywalled version to the blendle version. To see an article on blendle, i'd have to go out of my way to find it on blendle, and their browsing experience wasn't especially great.

Scroll looks really nice because you don't have to access the content through scroll. You're still on the original source, and you get the benefits of your Scroll subscription no matter how you found the article.

The downside here is that because Scroll isn't re-hosting the content, you're stuck reading it on the generally awful websites of the original publishers, which are only made marginally better by the lack of ads and trackers.

[ripdog]

I had the same issue. I emailed blendle, suggesting they write a browser extension which could manually/automatically redirect supported publications to the blendle equivalent. Obviously, they didn't think that was necessary.

Can't say I think much of their decision-making skills.

[gargs]

Would be great to hear more about what newspapers and magazines you’re subscribed to. I am in the same boat and much prefer subscriptions to quality journalism instead of untenable options like paying by the article or installing ad-blockers. The former just incentivizes the same crappy journalism as ads, and the latter is disingenuous.

I am subscribed to the FT, Guardian online.