4 ms·
It's kind of a protest against the unethical practice that sites like this often do where they let search engines see their entire article for free just to get
by mholt 3y ago
It's kind of a protest against the unethical practice that sites like this often do where they let search engines see their entire article for free just to get indexed and ranked highly, only to lock out visitors who click on those links. It's deceptive and manipulative just to get clicks.
gary_0's reply below is a good way to frame the deception: show the search engine one thing, show the user something else.
- gary_0 3y agoBefore they switched to pro-evil, Google used to ban you from their index if you did that (show them one thing, and human visitors something else).
- spoonjim 3y agoWhich itself had funny consequences. Expert Sexchange used to show you a page with a payment dialog up top but you could just scroll down to the content.
- simondotau 3y agoI agree that we should criticise two-faced paywalls. We can do this by not linking to paywalled articles in the first place. After all, this is just reporting of a newsworthy event, other publishers exist — or will exist within minutes. (And if there aren't at least two good sources of reporting, perhaps we shouldn't assume it's true anyway?) It's important to remember that respect for the fundamentals of copyright is a prerequisite for respecting the GNU GPL and other such open source licenses.