It’s a bit off topic, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the increasing number of paywalled sites that I seem to encounter daily. Obviously for-profit businesses need to raise revue to continue to function, but why tease online information and then extort subscription fees for access. It’s particularly frustration on websites that are already awash in ads.

Is access to information a universal right or a privilege? Depending on your answer to this question, you may have mixed feelings about removing paywalls. I am all for paying for services that I get a lot of value from. I rarely run into a pay-wall in the first place. But when I do run into one, it’s usually because some article from an outlet I don’t frequent caught my interest and is behind a very strict pay-wall. Sorry, but I’m not about to fork over $10+ for a single article I don’t even know the quality of.

Some pay-walls are more technically sophisticated than others, so the things I am about to mention may not even work for you. I think they are worth bookmarking even if not 100% reliable. If you are lucky, the pay-wall is essentially a bit of JavaScript code layered on top of the article, in which case using a service that shows you the page without loading this JavaScript code will do the trick. If you paste the link to your article into 12ft.io, you may be able to read the article without any issues. If your browser has a “reader mode” this may also work. Should this trick not work for you don’t lose hope quite yet.

Some outlets will have impenetrable pay-walls – unless you are a robot, in which case they may grant you a free peek. This is because these outlets want their articles to be indexed by search engines so that they show up when people search for stuff. Search engines basically have bots “crawl” from web-page to web-page to make sense of the pages content and importance. If the article you want to read has been visited by the internet archive’s bot, you have a pretty solid chance of being able to read that article. Simply copy the link to the article and paste it into the search bar on archive.org. If the article is in the archive, you should now be able to see the full thing. If it’s not, you can request it to be archived or just try again later. Of course, very recent articles are unlikely to have been archived already. Sometimes even if the page is archived it will still show the pay wall.