Five (and a bonus sixth) things about Scroll First: although I don’t have any specific reason to distrust Scroll, this still feels like a data privacy time bomb. Scroll won’t sell my data, but what if the company that snaps up Scroll does someday? There’s a prominent button for deleting your data, at least. Scroll’s privacy policy is refreshingly readable and candid about what it gathers and what it does and doesn’t share — including being honest about sharing information with governments when required to by law. It also notes that your data could go along with a sale of the company itself. Basically I suggest you find the “delete your information” button and remember where it is. Second: Scroll’s entire method of stopping ads is an absolutely ingenious repurposing of third-party cookies. You log into Scroll, it sets a cookie, and then the websites you visit see that special cookie and don’t serve you ads. It’s not even ad-blocking, they just don’t get served. It is actually quite elegant, but if you take a second to think through the chain of communications and deals that are required to make it that elegant, it seems like a hellacious hack. Then again, as Nilay Patel said to me today, isn’t most web technology a hellacious hack? There are a few more details — Safari in particular is stricter than other browsers and so it requires an extension. Brave will also need some extra effort to work with Scroll. (Scroll has a snarky footnote about them.) Third: it’s a much easier solution for websites to get paid than asking each of them to roll their own subscription. It tracks where you visit and automatically divvies payment up between those partner sites. I could (and eventually will) quibble about the percentage Scroll is taking: $1.50 out of $5, or thirty percent. As an independent startup, I’m not going to begrudge Scroll its revenue, and it likely needs a bigger cut to stay in business than Apple or Google do on their App Stores. If the company hits scale, though, I’d like to hope that it will find a way to reduce that cut. Fourth: hang on let’s think about that hellacious hack again! Although you have to constantly have Scroll email you a “magic link” and then ensure you open it in the right browser, it means that you are getting your paid-for ad-free experience in the app of your choosing. Unlike Apple News (disclosure: another Vox Media partner), you aren’t forced into a not-especially-great app. You don’t get a link that seems like it goes to a web page but actually just goes to Apple’s app. You can also use it on any device you own, not just Apple’s products. Also unlike Apple News, this subscription isn’t really a subscription. For publications that put articles behind paywalls, Scroll won’t get you in. On the whole, though, I much prefer Scroll’s system to Apple News. It works better with the existing web and the existing apps we all use to navigate it. A subscription system that turns off ads, pays publishers, and doesn’t lock me into any particular app while also doing a pretty good job of keeping my login active? Seems good to me. Still, I’m not quite going to go quite so far as to endorse Scroll (and not just because Vox Media is a partner). Deciding to sign up is between you, your level of trust in Scroll’s privacy policies, your ad-blocking conscience, whether you care about the current list of partner publications, and the cost. Fifth: Scroll puts a white bar at the bottom of every webpage it’s active on, ostensibly so you have the benefit of getting share links and an audio reader mode. No thank you times a thousand, Scroll. However, one benefit of using web browsers instead of Apple News is that web browsers are relatively open platforms and so you can use them to alter the web pages you visit (at least on the desktop — on mobile things are still often locked down). So, for example, I have a little script that I cobbled together after a day of Googling that makes it easier for me to format the links in this newsletter by automatically changing the web page I store them on, Pinboard.in. My favorite method is an extension called Tampermonkey. I wrote a little script for it that hides Scroll’s annoying bar. Other than some preliminary settings, it’s literally one line. It should work in Chromium-based browsers. Here it is, offered with zero support and absolutely no guarantees that it’s any good at all. Bonus sixth revelation: Tampermonkey offers a Google Drive-based sync, and since Microsoft’s new Edge browser runs on Chromium, my script auto-synced from Chrome on a Mac to Edge on Windows and Just Worked. The Internet! Sometimes it’ll surprise you. | 
