12ft.io Taken Down

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Tension between ads, paywalls, and access

  • Many dislike ads (tracking, intrusive formats, degradation of UX) but also find “paywall everything” problematic, especially for important public-interest reporting.
  • Freemium models (a few free articles, then paywall) are seen as clumsy and technically burdensome for small publishers.
  • Several argue that news mistakenly trained users to expect free content in the early web era and now must retrain them to pay if they want quality and slower, more careful reporting.

Subscriptions, bundles, and “Spotify for news”

  • There’s strong “subscription fatigue”: people don’t want dozens of $5–$20/month subs for occasional articles.
  • Bundles (Apple News, “Spotify for text”) are viewed as a likely compromise, but:
    • They entrench large incumbents and leave out small outlets.
    • Examples like Spotify show how revenue pools and algorithms can disadvantage most creators.
    • Apple News loses appeal because it still shows ads.

Micropayments and alternative models

  • Many want per-article or “prepaid pool” systems, sometimes with usage-based splits or even pay-by-percentage-read.
  • Others note repeated failures (Flattr, Blendle, Google Contributor, BAT/Brave, Scroll) and argue that:
    • Psychological friction and very low willingness-to-pay per piece kill the model.
    • Ad tech often pays more, more reliably, than users will.
  • Crypto or universal “web currency” ideas resurface, but are seen as either untested at scale or already tried.

Ad blocking, archives, and circumvention tools

  • Users widely mention tools: browser extensions, archive.today, Internet Archive, CommonCrawl, and now 13ft after 12ft’s takedown.
  • Some note that most paywalls can be bypassed via headers, cookies, or JS control without third parties.
  • There’s technical debate on whether 12ft/13ft simply impersonate Googlebot and why publishers don’t reliably block that.

Ethics and sustainability

  • One side calls bypassing paywalls theft: publishers set a price; taking without paying undermines journalism, especially local reporting.
  • The opposing view treats piracy/circumvention as an unavoidable fact, criticizes dark-pattern subscriptions and tracking, and stresses personal support only for outlets one truly values.
  • Underlying question: how to fund investigative and local journalism at all, in a landscape dominated by noise, consolidation, and ad-driven incentives.