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Why Paywalls Need To Be So Fragile (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Despite the ferment that occurs when yet another digital publisher paywalls a news-site, most paywalls are absurdly easy to circumvent, even using no other software than a web-browser, because of the need to present unrestricted content to the search engines that publicise it. None of the parties involved are considering anyone else's point of view: Google wants free flow of information funded by merit-based advertising revenue; publishers want to restore consumer lock-in in a network environment of story-led consumers who have completely abandoned the concept; and Apple is fine with content-blocking, since it just wants to sell hardware.
I don't mind paywalls. They let me know these sites don't want me as a visitor. I'm good with that. Such things simply generate a reflexive "okthxbai", and that's the end of that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So what happens when the first seven search results for a particular query end up being sites that "generate a reflexive 'okthxbai'"? This happens to me often when I try to search Google for certain linguistics topics: if it's not on Linguistics Stack Exchange, it's paywall, paywall, paywall. I imagine a long string of paywalled results would make web search engines far less convenient to use.
Ugh, ads are so bad. I only block them for security reasons...honest.
Oh, what's that? Some sites are using paywalls instead of ads? Hmm.. well those need to be easy to get around too..because of...reasons. Not because I'm self-entitled and gimme gimme gimme. I mean, sites should just go under if I deem they aren't "worth" it, yet somehow they do have some worth since I'm visiting them in the first place. Don't point that out though, I don't want the cognitive dissonance.
It's because viewing one single page on each of ten different sites is not worth a separate $60 per year subscription to each site. This in turn is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
Of course not.
What I am saying is you might be looking at increasingly specialized resources, and in my experience the more specialized the field, the less useful Google can be, and the more likely the people who control that information are to lock it down.
Unfortunately, the more beholden to a source of information you are, the less flexibility you have to say "okthxbai" and just click the back button.
And then you have to decide which you are more willing to part with, your money or the information you wish you had.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
experts-exchange.com is probably the perfect example of an arms race that ended with everybody leaving the site. It used to be relatively easy to get past the paywall. Eventually they started making it harder and harder. Stackoverflow came along, and had no paywall, and actually made things a lot easier to use. They found other ways to make money rather than force people to pay to see answers. Now Stackoverflow has all the users, and most people new to programming haven't even heard of experts-exchange.com
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's fitting that the hyphen site's theme song is "Communication Breakdown" by Led Zeppelin.
All of their content was scraped from sites like Stack Overflow, so there was no point in expert sexchange even existing other than to trap users that did not know better.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Then don't make it ridiculously hard to set one up! I'm looking at you, New Scientist. This UK site invites readers to access its premium articles by setting up a free account that requests some demographic information. Fine as a concept, until you get to the point where you choose a password. Acceptable passwords are filtered through a set of complexity rules more appropriate for James Bond 007 License To Kill clearance than a site for socially conscious pop science articles. So far as I'm concerned, a site that won't accept the studiously randomized passwords generated by password managers is not a site I'm interested in accessing.