I’ve been seeing some complaints about paywalled content being posted in the rss.ponder.cat communities.

Here’s my proposal:

  • Split the bot into two users: free@rss.ponder.cat and paywall@rss.ponder.cat.
  • Make a rule similar to some other communities, forbidding people from posting full text or links to archive.is on the paywalled communities.
  • If you like some of the paywalled content, subscribe to it. You can afford $5-10/month for one or two sources, and it’ll help them a lot. Creating good content on the internet isn’t free.
  • If you don’t want the paywalled content, block the paywall bot and you won’t have to see it in your feed.
  • If you don’t want any of it, block both bots or the whole instance.

It’s a real problem that Lemmy communities sometimes have paywalled content from 50 different sources, which makes it annoying to use and unreasonable to tell people to subscribe to content they want to read, because they would need 50 different subscriptions.

I think the RSS bot is a better solution than just ripping off content from all the high-quality online news sources and shrugging your shoulders if they go out of business and can’t do it anymore a year from now. Everybody wins. High quality online news can still pay their bills, and you get a good way to stay up to date on it within Lemmy.

I’m posting this here instead of in the meta community because I have a feeling that most of the people who are saying they don’t like the paywalled content are not subscribed, and I’d like to get feedback from the community as a whole.

What do people think?

Edit: I’ve implemented the proposal. There are now separate bots @free@rss.ponder.cat and @paywall@rss.ponder.cat.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    29 days ago

    Tbh, while the split you’re proposing would be nice, I think the prevalence of various hard and soft paywalls is so high that the “free” version would be kinda useless. It isn’t like lemmy as a whole isn’t used to bypassing paywalls and/or using extensions that block popups.

    I’ve had no issues with the bot as is. It’s actually a really useful bot as-is.

    But, if whoever is curating the bot wants to do the extra work, it would be broly as hell of them.

    • PhilipTheBucketOPAEnglish
      3·
      29 days ago

      Most of the most popular RSS communities are free. I like some of them that are paywalled and a little way down the list, like !thenewyorker@rss.ponder.cat and !theatlantic@rss.ponder.cat, but most of the top ones are free. One of the really nice things about one community per source is that you know which ones to subscribe to and which ones you’d have to pay for that you can block.

      If you don’t know the New York Times has a paywall, and you click on a link to them, that’s a learning experience for you at this point. I think some of the griping about paywalls is just entitled. It’s okay if people made content for you and they want to get paid. At the same time, I’m not trying to spam people who don’t want paywall content. If I can make a quality-of-life improvement for people who don’t want to get burned by paywalls on random links from places they’ve never heard of, then fine.

      I also want to give shout-outs to some feeds that are way, way down and trying to charge money for very high quality stuff: