[donohoe]

I use services like this as I often skip news site paywalls because I just can't afford, nor is it practical, to have so many subscriptions.

That said, I work in news media (and have been involved in building paywalls at different orgs - NYT and New Yorker). I know how money for these directly support journalism - salaries and the costs with associated with any story.

If you are skipping paywalls a lot, I would encourage you to pay for a subscription to at least one or two news sites you respect - bonus points if its a small or medium local newsroom that benefits!

For me that has been; NYTimes, New Yorker, Wired, Teen Vogue, and my wife's hometown paper in Illinois.

[stetrain]

My personal experience with this has been that paying for a subscription still gets me inundated with ads and marketing (often more now that I'm on their official mailing list), is still inconvenient since I may not be logged in to every news site on every device where I may follow an article link, and leaves me to fight through dark patterns to unsubscribe, since a button to allow you to cancel online is clearly dark magic that has not yet been invented.

I do wish there was a better way for me to share an account across multiple news sites that let me properly pay for good journalism without these issues. I do subscribe to a very local news source that seems to handle this a lot better, but they also don't paywall (most) of their primary content.

In the meantime I do find it strange that so many sites wish to gain the advantage of advertising that they have put up an article on the web, without actually providing that article. I have no issue with paid content, but when that content gets listed in search engine results and social media links like a web page, but clicking on it does not behave like a web page, It feels something feels like something has broken from the idea of the linkable World Wide Web.

[mejthemage]

There's a huge need for subscription bundles. I'd gladly pay $20/mo for access to a bunch of big names, even if I'm limited to like 60 articles per month combined across those sources.

Instead I just don't pay anyone, turn back when I encounter a paywall and look for someone's summary if I'm really interested.

[orpheansodality]

Isn’t that the value-prop of Apple News?

[basch]

Apple News is a bit of a discovery pain in the neck. If I have a 5 year old Atlantic article, I can’t just click the article and have it open in Apple News. I can’t search for it. If the article is any older, the magazine won’t appear at all.

[stetrain]

In my experience Apple news relies entirely on the app for reading articles, so if you are on a computer without the app or following a link that doesn't auto-redirect to the app then you still hit the paywall.

I'd rather have a system that was just a cross-website web account.

[QkPrsMizkYvt]

There used to be an app called scroll (https://twitter.com/tryscroll?lang=en), which got bought by Twitter, which is now part of subscription, but only for the top articles. Informed.so is doing something similar but different: https://www.informed.so/

The problem creating such a service is that most media houses believe that their content is the best thing since sliced bread and thus they often don't want to partner. Even though most of their content isn't that unique. Of course, some publications do have unique content, e.g. nyt, bloomberg.

I could see artifact being an interesting company to tackle this though (https://artifact.news/). They are already sending traffic to news sites and only serving what the user wants. If they now let me bypass paywalls for $20 that would be nice.

[2cpu1container]

I can fully agree on that.