h a l f b a k e r yExpensive, difficult, slightly dangerous, not particularly effective... I'm on a roll.
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Some time ago I posted the linked Liberal Time of the
Month idea, noting that paywalls, by limiting you to
a few articles early in the month, were creating a weird
information vacuum for the the rest of the month.
With the paywalls now being implemented more and
more aggressively by more and
more publications,
which those organizations are doing to survive as
businesses, we are now accelerating the following
trends:
1. Shortness of attention span -- we just see the
headlines
2. Preaching only to the choir -- we see any level of
detail only for things for which we already pay, if
anything
thereby worsening the echo chamber.
Without getting into copyright law per se, the proposal
here is that Search Engines be regulated in only
showing links that are fully viewable -- i.e. where the
current practice of linking you to the article, which
you then cannot fully read -- be considered a kind of bait
& switch.
Under those regulations, search engines would have to
chose to either bypass such links -- which they
wouldn't to continue to be relevant to their users -- OR --
have them pay or reach other agreements with
content providers so that the article linked be made fully
available.
Even simply adjusting links to show that there's a paywall
would drastically alter both content provider and
search engine behavior
Liberal Time of the Month
It_27s_20That_20(Li..._20of_20the_20Month
[theircompetitor, Jul 17 2019]
[link]
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You *could* preach to a medieval manuscript; the level of detail you uncover while speaking to it would depend on your ability to transpose those tricky effs which are really esses as you read while speaking while reading while speaking. |
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I hate this practice, but using regulation to try to fix it is a really bad idea. |
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I think excluding the links entirely is a bad idea, but
having a system whereby I know before I click on the link
whether or not there is a paywall would be very good. I
often click on a link that may or may not be of interest.
If it was marked, I would think for a second before
clicking to avoid accidentally wasting one of my free
viewings on an article that I didn't have a lot of interest
in seeing or for which there appeared to be many good
articles form other sources. |
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It might be good to have this feature built into the
browser, not just the search engine, so link here in the HB
and other places would also be marked. |
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It seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to make a
browser plug-in to accomplish this. The plug-in would
just need to keep a list of sites that do this. It might not
be perfect, since I doubt that going to the home page of
the New York Times uses up any of your monthly quota,
but it could still be useful. It could also count how many
times you've gone to the site and display that when you
hover over the link. That way you know if you might be
down to you last free page of the month and can save it
for something important. |
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A third-party browser plug-in might collect targeted statistics showing the average "read-time" spent after clicking a search result
before closing or clicking the "back" button.
Those websites that took you to a paywall, rickroll or goatse type end-point ought, statistically to have shorter read-times than those
with in-depth content that people wanted to read. |
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Of course, the problem isn't in building such a thing, it's in getting enough people to start using it and agreeing to pool their
collective data in order for it to be useful. |
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And further, the trouble with any such fix is that unscrupulous folks are likely to hire teams of VPN-obfuscated low-cost workers to
deliberately click-close reputable news sources, while click-waaaaiting on paywall links of their own in order to subvert any such
algorithm, so it's all effectively pointless. |
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Ideally, what we really need to do is stop this internet, and do it again, only without all the shit bits. |
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ah, if they'd only never introduced all you can eat Internet
plans, so much would have been different... |
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