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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2335 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

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.

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