I don't understand. Isn't this stealing?
[deleted]
On the Future of 12ft
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not following your logic here. The Economist wants to charge readers because they produce high quality content that's worth paying for (in their estimation). This seems entirely orthogonal to whether they blacklist a web crawler - a crawler they didn't even ask for, which would be all over their website whether they want it or not. I think you're confused because the crawler and the browser both use the same chan…
And surely we'd want high quality content returned from a search engine. If Google never returned results where the company wanted me to buy something it'd be pretty sparse
Seems like you should take that up with Google? Why should The Economist be obligated to serve no content to a crawler just because they want to charge readers a fair price for their content?
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#33Re: On the Future of 12ft
#34From the home page explanation.... > How does it work? > 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. — https://12ft.io/ They're just…
I doubt that’s how it really works.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#35> How does it work? > 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 clie…
You can't do it client side. Well-implemented paywalls clip the content server-side. If you're Google, you get the full HTML, if you're not, you don't.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#36> How does it work? > 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 clie…
You can't do it client side. Well-implemented paywalls clip the content server-side. If you're Google, you get the full HTML, if you're not, you don't.
But I could change my clients User Agent to match the Google Crawler?
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
And surely we'd want high quality content returned from a search engine. If Google never returned results where the company wanted me to buy something it'd be pretty sparse
Seems like you should take that up with Google? Why should The Economist be obligated to serve no content to a crawler just because they want to charge readers a fair price for their content?
I think the person you're replying to is agreeing with you.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#38I don't understand. Isn't this stealing?
No, because when you read an article a copy is made and sent to you. You are not depriving anybody from anything.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#39I have one almost legitimate use for 12ft.io - sharing links for a paid subscription news site where I actually pay the annual fee and the site has it’s own way of letting users share articles with friends and family.
But the built in process is onerous, one has to sign up and they nag you to subscribe which is a long journey to read one article.
So I hope 12ft guy can find a niche like that to sustain a legitimate business.
Re: On the Future of 12ft
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be fine with that if they didn't let search engines crawl their content. If they want to be on the web, they have to play by the rules of the web. Instead what they want is to reap the benefits of the web while refusing to participate in the open web.
What the heck are the “rules of the web”? Only valueless information is allowed to be indexed? Are you offended that when you search for a book on Amazon you have to pay to read the whole thing?
> Are you offended that when you search for a book on Amazon you have to pay to read the whole thing?
You don’t. ;)
And, those are the rules of the web.