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You must be new and young, most internet communities have always been login-walled or otherwise inaccessible to the wider public. Why? Nowadays it's to combat
by Dalewyn 3y ago
You must be new and young, most internet communities have always been login-walled or otherwise inaccessible to the wider public.
Why? Nowadays it's to combat freeloading "AI" data scraping, but more predominantly it's been to fight spam and scraping of data in general.
So no, nothing is over. If anything, we're getting back to the status quo of 20 years ago when most forums required you to make an account to enter.
- rchaud 3y agoHere's a list of open-access communities I grew up on: Hacker News, Myspace, LiveJournal, XDA-Developers, RateyourMusic/AbsolutePunk forums, and about a thousand phpBB/vBuletin boards from 20 years ago. Every single one of these is close to 20 years old. It is in fact the "new and young" that think they need to "download the app" and "join the community" for every single thing that could just be a Discourse message board.
- autoexec 3y agoHell, there were BBSs that let you browse around under a guest account with zero requirement to register an account
- g-b-r 3y agoIt's as if you were describing an alternate reality Extremely few forums required an account to read them 20 years ago, that practice largely began with Facebook
- Dalewyn 3y agoMost of the forums I patronized left their index open to the wider public, maybe also let the wider public read posts, and almost always blocked user profiles (read: treasure troves of personal information) without logging in.
- g-b-r 3y agoUser profiles were indeed blocked to the public on most forums, but I very rarely found that a problem Change that maybe to definitely, I guarantee you that very few were auth-walled
- baud147258 3y ago> Extremely few forums required an account to read them 20 years ago The few forums I currently frequent don't require an account to read most of the threads.