Yeah the article stub doesn't link to the article. It links to a login flow with the article id. If you go directly to the article you get redirected if you don't have a session.

It's incredibly easy to make an impossible to get around paywall. Porn has done it since the Internet existed.

In this very particular situation I'm glad most companies are lazy and stupid.

I don't particularly care if a company does pay only content. I think its legitimately ok. I hate companies that don't make you pay enough for the service to cover their costs thus leading to complete enshitifaction.

[–] ChuckEffingNorris@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 hours ago

I thought the issue was they wanted search engines to be able to see the content, but not non paying viewers? Hence slightly shitty paywalls.

[–] humorlessrepost@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

It's incredibly easy to make an impossible to get around paywall.

Sure, but the easily-bypassed js method makes sure it’s still crawlable by search engines, which is a trade well worth making where I work. Doesn’t matter as much for porn sites since the title and description aren’t the content most people are there for, so you can expose them on the paywall page.

[–] sudoer777@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

Maybe they have a way to unblock major search engine crawlers but block it for everyone else now? I know Cloudflare was doing something similar for some bot protection mechanism, and this seems like something news outlets would want to do also.

[–] xenoclast@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Very true. I don't disagree at all. I think once google finally becomes totally useless. It won't matter.

I mean Google is already just Yellow Pages AdWords edition with AI content