GreasyFork: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/452024-hacker-news-anti-pa...

Source code: https://github.com/MostlyEmre/hn-anti-paywall

Now let me overexplain.

-Why?-

I never liked paywalled articles. I understand where they come from, but I don't like where we cross our paths.

This is why I don't use major news aggregators anymore. Instead, I spend my "catching-up-with-the-world-time" on Hacker News. However, Hacker News (HN) also has its fair-share of paywalled articles. (Around 11.6% according to my short-lived, half-assed attempt at measuring it. See my super old data https://hpa.emre.ca/ I tell the story below.)

-First try-

Around a year ago, when I ran the above experiment, my goal wasn't to run that experiment. It was during my self-teaching & career-changing process, I decided to build a React HN clone. To make it stand-out from the bunch, I added a paywall feature. It would detect paywalled articles and would add an archive URL into the metadata.

The issue with archiving is unless someone archived the link before on the {archiving-project} then the link is most likely not archived. So me sending people to those projects meant nothing. It kinda meant something for me from an ideological standpoint but I assume you are not me.

This rubbed me the wrong way. I decided to build a backend (See https://github.com/MostlyEmre/HN-Paywall-Archiver) that would scan the links and automatically to detect paywalls close to real-time and submit paywalled ones to archive.is for archival. I used Nodejs, Firebase, and React. I was -still am- really proud because I believed it was doing public good in terms of digital preservation. Only 1 person needed to run this script to benefit everyone. As an extra, I was curious on how many paywalled articles were being shared, by whom, at what time. So I also created some analytics functionality to gather the data. And later created a UI to present it.

HN-Paywall-Archiver was great but I stopped running the backend at some point. Because at that point couldn't find a way to continuously run my backend code on some platform for cheap or didn't try hard enough.

P.S. Recently I've been thinking of remaking this version with Cloudflare Workers.

-Hacker News Paywall Archiver Userscript-

After almost a year, I got into userscripts. Super great super awesome concept. People seem to hate javascript unless it is presented as a userscript. So I decided to get my hands dirty to create a simple solution that solves the paywall issue on HN without breaking any hearts.

My solution is not perfect as it had to be simple. But here's the rundown.

Pros:

- Does not beg for attention.

- Simple code, simple concept.

- Unintentionally, indicates which submissions are paywalled without you interacting with anything.

- Not-yet-archived archive links can make you feel like you are contributing to the society after you click on the "archive this URL" button on project page.

- Uses HN html defaults, so I hope it plays well with the HN skins/plugins/userscripts you use.

Cons:

- It doesn't automatically archive the links.

- It uses clone of a static list of paywalled websites sourced from a popular Chrome extension. (https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...) So changing the paywall list is slow and manual.

- No guarantees of archived links actually having the archive readily available for reading. Though there are currently 3 projects added, so it should be enough for most links.

So, there you go. I hope you enjoy it. It can break occasionally due to changes in news.ycombinator code, if you let me know on Twitter, I can fix it ASAP. Otherwise you have to wait until I notice that the script is broken, which can take quite a while as I browse HN on mobile.