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12ft.io Taken Down

newsmediaalliance.org

81–90 of 161 posts

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#81
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating Googlebot.

That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).

In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work with almost everything but at some point major news orgs caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering to try it.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#82
post #3

We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?

I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find valuable and ignore the rest.

Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#83
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet Archive is significantly less useful because they allow people to exclude their public social media accounts or websites. On a couple occasions I have tried to find a source for old deleted statements using the IA only to find that the data had been scrubbed. Fortunately archive.today still had a copy in one case, but in the other one I was out of luck.

What were you looking for that was prone to scrubbing? Just curious because I have a collection of historical data to go through and don't know what to expect

In one case it was a personal website, the other was a Twitter account. Both got scrubbed from the IA.

Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests, I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those cases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...

https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-site-...

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#84
post #11

Was it ever publicly communicated how 12ft or archive.ph|is work? Or is it something they keep to themselves ?

I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating Googlebot.

> they were just impersonating Googlebot.

Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

Kinda? The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way. In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than…

> The core idea behind BAT isn't bad

I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#86
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...

"Large portion"? I don't think it says that.

Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#87
post #35
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.

The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled content.

The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out.

You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.

If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#88
post #56

In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft. Edit: Microtr…

> replaced by microtransactions I assume you mean micro payments? Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.

Yea, micropayments but people can't keep up with dozens subscriptions. Someone will figure out micropayments sooner or later.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#89
post #80
post #3

We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?

I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read. I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.

There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.

Re: 12ft.io Taken Down

#90
post #35
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.

The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled content.

There’s no real way to tell if the content you share today will be paywalled tomorrow.
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