Dear everyone! It would be wonderful if you could mark links to paywalled articles as such – something simple like “($)” is more than good enough. Maybe we can make this part of the quiet Mastodon etiquette?
It is super frustrating to get a link to an article that sounds interesting, go there, click away the cookie banner,* then click away the newsletter popup, finally start reading and then the text fades out.
* I am aware there are tools for that.
Using images to convey important information is very bad for making it accessible.
I am fully sighted (with glasses) and the emojis in your post were not that distinguishable without looking closely.
@zoul @w_b @partim I suspect we will not land on a single consensus here and that's okay, but I agree that the unlocked icon just looks to me like the locked one, and -- to my perpetual annoyance -- emojis don't come with alt text that sighted users can read. (If anybody knows a tool for it, I want to know.)
To throw my hat in the ring, I'll suggest 🔒 or 🔐 for paywalled (incl reg) and 🔓🎁 or just 🎁 for gift links.
edit: it occurs to me that the 🔐 emoji could be interpreted as lock with key provided... i.e. unlocked or gift link. ugh.
Martin Hoffmann
Tomáš Znamenáček
Bill
Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)