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I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past

I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.

grkvlt 10y ago
Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...
- lokedhs 10y ago
  Yes you could. I'm not sure it always worked that way. My guess is they added that after being dropped by Google once Googlebot got smart enough to know you were hiding content.
- parrellel 10y ago
  Eventually, Google threatened to delist them if they didn't provide the content somewhere on the page.
dingaling 10y ago
Or just "View Source" and there was the raw text of the answer... What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.