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On the Future of 12ft

12ft.io

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Re: On the Future of 12ft

#21

Post by rhinoceraptor »

wrs wrote: post #8

The “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.

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.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#22

Post by mdoms »

jsmeaton wrote: post #20
wrs wrote: post #8

The “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.

Then search engine crawlers should get paywalled too. 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 pa…

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 channel and the same protocols to access the information (the website over HTTP). But that's just a detail. Google could send them a hand written form for them to fill out with details of each of their articles and some thumbnail images to be manually entered into a Google database for all we care.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#23

Post by mdoms »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #16
wrs wrote: post #8

The “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.

It's disingenuous to tease content that is behind a paywall.

Someone better tell every movie studio on Earth that's it's disingenuous to make movie trailers.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#24

Post by wrs »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #21
wrs wrote: post #8

The “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.

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?

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#26

Post by jrochkind1 »

From 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 showing you Google cache? Like.. what you can get by putting `cache:` in front of a URL in chrome? (Or using an extension in Firefox?).

So, this site gives you access to the same thing by putting `12ft.io/ ` in front of the URL instead of, say, `cache:`? Is there something more to it? That... seems like an interesting thing to ask people to pay for.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#27

Post by IanCal »

mdoms wrote: post #22
jsmeaton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then search engine crawlers should get paywalled too. 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 pa…

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

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#28

Post by aserdf »

mdoms wrote: post #22
jsmeaton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then search engine crawlers should get paywalled too. 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 pa…

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…

IMO the issue is the paywall is essentially "cloaking" by google webmaster standards. different content is displayed to the crawler (actual text of the article which gets indexed) vs the user (a paywall).

the content provider might not ask for the crawler but they are certainly catering to it - and benefitting from it.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#29

Post by mdoms »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #21
wrs wrote: post #8

The “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.

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.

You seem to have the misinformed belief that Google and search engines generally somehow make up the fundamental fabric of the web? Google is just a company that has a pretty good catalogue of what they've been able to piece together of what's available on the open web. Crawlers are no more a fundamental part of "the open web" than anything else.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#30

Post by [deleted] »

wrs wrote: post #8

The “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.

[deleted]
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