I think most of us only can reply to the first paragraph or so, and the first plot, because of the paywall. So most of the conversation is about the headline.
I’d have to check and see how it works. I’m happy to block ads (I’ll render whatever I’m sent however I want), but I wouldn’t want to access content that the publisher didn’t intend to send.
It works for sites that set a cookie to limit how many free articles you can see without logging in, or sites that let search engine scrapers bypass the paywall to read the full content.
I would say it's a little more ethically questionable than ad blocking. Ad blocking is like buying a paper from a newsstand and duct taping over the ads - totally fine, it's my paper and I'll do whatever I want with it. This extension is like hanging around the newsstand reading all the front pages until the owner shoos you away, and then coming back with a fake mustache to keep reading.
Yeah, it feels vaguely more grey-area than ad blocking. Although that’s just a gut read, not very reliable.
I’m very much ideological about being in the camp: you can send me whatever you want, and I’ll render it however I want, and anyone who has a problem that is the problem.
I’m not sure how I feel about impersonating a scraper or switching around my cookies so that the site sends me something else.
Actually, this is legitimately the first question in this area that has gotten me confused in a while; if the tool was impersonating somebody, a specific person with account, that’s just be straightforwardly unauthorized access. Impersonating a category of user that has no actual specific identity, but that they default to allowing access? That seems… I mean, doesn’t really seem like lying exactly, but it also doesn’t seem totally honest. Tricky!
I think it's clearly dishonest, but fairly limited potential to harm the business. It's on the same moral level as going to a chain restaurant every week and telling them it's your birthday every time so they give you a free dessert. It's definitely lying but you're not going to put them out of business. If everyone started doing this, they'd just get rid of the free dessert/free article policy and probably be fine.
One thing that gives me a little pause is, these sites, they treat search engine scrapers preferably to humans, right? And the scraper’s job is to categorize sites and recommend them to people.
So, IMO, it is more like: if most restaurants gave reviewers preferential treatment and tended to comp their meals, and this was very well known, and you went around telling everybody you were a reviewer. Which also seems dishonest, but it isn’t like you are exploiting some nice little cute good-faith thing like free dessert on your birthday, you are exploiting the restaurant’s attempt to get a better review. Seems, like, dishonest but fair play.
And, I’d love if search engines would stop giving me paywalled sites, haha. So maybe it would be nice if everyone would exploit this loophole, they could close it, and the whole system would get a little more honest. (I’m not doing it unilaterally though).
I think many people are just clicking on the main shared link, rather than using those tools.
For me personally—in general, I read the story that the author/publisher intentionally posted for public discussion. While it is possible to circumvent paywalls, I wouldn’t want to go against the will of the author and their publisher.
I think it is weird that we allow discussion of unauthorized copying of text here, but we don’t seem to allow (at least as far as I’ve seen) links for unauthorized copying of, say, movies or music.
