The original post: /r/lifeprotips by /u/indorock on 2024-12-05 12:02:24.

This applies especially to news sites in which only the first 5 lines of the article are shown, then they blur the next few lines and show an overlay which tells you to subscribe to read the rest. This truncating of the text and overlay display is usually done with client-side Javascript, which checks your browser to see if you’re logged in or not, and if not it will remove all but 5 lines of the article from the DOM, and show the paywall.

However, you can always stop the loading and execution of a page’s Javascript by simply using the Escape key. As the webpage loads, quickly and repeatedly spam the Escape key. More often than not, you will see the whole article load and no “Subscribe now to read the rest” overlay show up to ruin your day.

This does NOT work for all websites, some of them actually don’t load in any article content until AFTER it detects you have a user session, but for SEO purposes many sites go the other way around, by removing content when it doesn’t find a user session.

This technique works well on Rolling Stone for example.

(Yes, opening the site in an Incognito window or clearing/disallowing cookies would also work with RS, but the Escape key method is simpler for me)