Also I wonder what kind of hosting 12ft is using, where bandwith costs so much, unless they are using 100s of TB per month or more (maybe they are). These days there is tons of super low cost bandwidth if you bypass the big providers.
On the Future of 12ft
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Re: On the Future of 12ft
#12The “Why?” section of the home page is rather disingenuous, since the Economist is not “SEO optimized garbage”, nor does it want you to “sign up for some newsletter”. It’s just an excellent newspaper that needs to pay the staff that writes all those articles. Just like 12ft.io needs to pay its hosting provider.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#13Genuinely curious, as I've just been using [1] and have had no issues bypassing paywalls. If 12ft has access to more sites, or something, that would be a better use case.
The owner of the repo does not even want donations, just a star, otherwise, I'd contribute!
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#14Is there a reason this isn’t built into Brave? Lawsuits?
Edit: derp. Just read the now section. So if a copy of the cache is just being downloaded why couldn’t this type of thing all be done locally?
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#15Is there a reason this isn’t built into Brave? Lawsuits?
I don’t get the architecture behind the site. Why do the request need to come from this service? How are the paywalls actually being bypassed? Edit: derp. Just read the now section. So if a copy of the cache is just being downloaded why couldn’t this type of thing all be done locally?
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#16The “Why?” section of the home page is rather disingenuous, since the Economist is not “SEO optimized garbage”, nor does it want you to “sign up for some newsletter”. It’s just an excellent newspaper that needs to pay the staff that writes all those articles. Just like 12ft.io needs to pay its hosting provider.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#17Have you considered using hosts that come with more free / unlimited bandwidth?
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#18How is 12ft Ladder any different than this Github repo that does the same thing? This is one of the more popular repos as well at 22k stars. Genuinely curious, as I've just been using [1] and have had no issues bypassing paywalls. If 12ft has access to more sites, or something, that would be a better use case. The owner of the repo does not even want donations, just a star, otherwise, I'd contribute! [1] https://gith…
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#19> The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.
> All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
This seems like something that could be accomplished entirely client-side, without incurring bandwidth costs to the server.
Or am I missing something about how this service works?
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#20The “Why?” section of the home page is rather disingenuous, since the Economist is not “SEO optimized garbage”, nor does it want you to “sign up for some newsletter”. It’s just an excellent newspaper that needs to pay the staff that writes all those articles. Just like 12ft.io needs to pay its hosting provider.
The motivation is correct. You run a search on google and get mostly paywalled content. I'm fine with news sites requiring subscriptions to view their articles but they shouldn't also get the benefit of being listed at the top of search results for key terms.
Alternatively, the search list should show if content is paywalled or give you search options to remove paywalled content.