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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2420 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 12, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Best recommendations for bypassing paywalls?

Follow-up: Anyone have a reliable way for Substack? I'd gladly get a subscription along the lines of "unlock 10 pay-walled articles per month", but I'm not paying several hundreds of dollars per year for just a hand full of authors... they really need to rework their subscription model.

I've looked a few times but never succeeded.

Frankly I don't really understand how paywall bypasses work or why if Substack can block them, why everyone else doesn't use the same/similar tech to block them

There are really two different types of paywalls. The lazy version just hides the content using JavaScript but the site still serves it, so it can be displayed with a browser extension. Or the site gives you "n free articles" so an extension can just reset the counter. This has become less common over time.

Services like Substack use a more advanced version, that only serve the paywalled content to authenticated users. To get around that, you generally need:

  1. Someone with a paid account willing to scrape the content (or allow their creds to be used to scrape it).

  2. A site willing to host the content that won't fold after the first DMCA request.

I'm not aware of a Substack service for this, but archive.today does it for major news publications that are paywalled, and there's a fairly well known one for Patreon called kemono dot cr where people can upload paywalled content, or provide their Patreon auth token to enable it to be scraped automatically.

Archive.is basically abuses the fact that most publications want their content to show up on search engines. It pretends to crawls the html once and then just displays the cached version to the user.

Google used to have a link to cached pages in the search results. They also used to penalize (in site rankings) showing different pages to the search crawlers and regular browsers (I assume by spot checking the difference). I remember spoofing the GoogleBot user agent at least once to bypass a paywall, though.

The digital frontier isn't what it used to be: that ship seems to have sailed.

This is probably the most frequently requested feature request for Substack. I'd love if they had a credits system where you could buy €10 worth of credits, and pay €1 to unlock one article in perpetuity.

It seems like the space is ripe for someone to negotiate subscriptions at a discount, then charge a subscription for reposts on their own sub stack.

Seconding archive.is or archive.org. Smry.ai works really well for certain sites.

Bypass Paywalls Clean

https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234

It’s on a Russian site because it kept getting DMCAd on GitHub.

I tend to use archive.is, and if that's down, archive.org will do some. This is pretty basic and doesn't handle all sites, but it gets most of the bigger ones.

If anyone has a way to sneak past Substack, that's one I'd love to have.

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