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On the Future of 12ft

12ft.io

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Re: On the Future of 12ft

#51

Post by xanth »

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.

1. I pay for The Economist, I want to share articles with my family & friends without them having to jump through the login hoop, until quite recently there wasn't an intention method to do this[1]

2. My partner is an annalist, her work is often quoted and republished in part or in full behind paywalls, going through correct channels to read what they published can take days to weeks & they need to know Pronto!

Edit: Clearly because I'm paying for The Economist I believe they should be remunerated for their journalism, but a hard policy of "no access unless you've verify-ably paid" would be a worse status quo

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://myaccount.economist.co...

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#52

Post by quickthrower2 »

vimy wrote: post #34
jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

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…

I doubt that’s how it really works.

I suspect they cache the cache? And resolve any css issues?

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#53

Post by quickthrower2 »

poopsmithe wrote: post #5

Well this is ironic. Well intentioned developer creates site to bypass paywalls. Site is a popular success, and begins to cost too much money for the developer to maintain. Developer comes up with a solution which is to introduce an optional paywall. I'm not just poking fun... I actually sympathize because I'm in a similar situation with one of my projects. I've had to reconsider being a 100% ideals-based person and…

Yeah otherwise you could have an ad blocker blocker unblocker running ads.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#54

Post by ketzo »

This person is asking for money in order to help provide a service… and that service is “stop other people from asking for money to provide a service.” Hard not to feel a little irony.

There are approximately three outcomes here.

1. Google shuts this guy down, some way or another 2. Paywalled sites sue this into oblivion

Or worst of all,

3. Google stops being able to usefully surface decent news content.

Paywalls are annoying, but this is not a long-term solution.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#58

Post by john-doe »

I used 12ft for some time and got tired of loading bloated news websites twice. Archive.today is a good alternative but means making copies of crap articles somewhere else, while I just want to read them once. Ultimately I recommend txtify.it, a service that uses Readability, as a more sensible solution.

Bookmarklet: javascript:q=location.hostname+location.pathname;location.href="https://txtify.it/"+q;

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#59

Post by lern_too_spel »

mdoms wrote: post #29
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

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.

GP's complaint is that these publishers are serving different content to Google than they serve to people, and Google knows this but pretends that people will get the indexed page. This is the search engine's fault. If it knows I will get a different result because I neither have nor want an account, it should let me hide that result, so I won't waste my time.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#60

Post by behringer »

waffle_maniac wrote: post #10
whateveriforgot wrote: post #4

12ft.io does a great job of bypassing paywalls, which is needed because people want to avoid paying for the content they want to see. What's more, 12ft is basically an open CGI proxy server. The chances that it will be used to death without any efficient way to monetize it seems high. FWIW I do think it's a great service and is very helpful when you only need to access one article from a site you'll never need/want a…

If it’s successful won’t publishers fight back like they did with outline.com?

You'd think they'd have to take it up with Google.
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