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I think it's clearly dishonest, but fairly limited potential to harm the business. It's on the same moral level as going to a chain restaurant every week and te

I think it's clearly dishonest, but fairly limited potential to harm the business. It's on the same moral level as going to a chain restaurant every week and telling them it's your birthday every time so they give you a free dessert. It's definitely lying but you're not going to put them out of business. If everyone started doing this, they'd just get rid of the free dessert/free article policy and probably be fine.

bee_rider 3y ago
One thing that gives me a little pause is, these sites, they treat search engine scrapers preferably to humans, right? And the scraper’s job is to categorize sites and recommend them to people. So, IMO, it is more like: if most restaurants gave reviewers preferential treatment and tended to comp their meals, and this was very well known, and you went around telling everybody you were a reviewer. Which also seems dishonest, but it isn’t like you are exploiting some nice little cute good-faith thing like free dessert on your birthday, you are exploiting the restaurant’s attempt to get a better review. Seems, like, dishonest but fair play. And, I’d love if search engines would stop giving me paywalled sites, haha. So maybe it would be nice if everyone would exploit this loophole, they could close it, and the whole system would get a little more honest. (I’m not doing it unilaterally though).