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12ft.io is critical to netneutrality, and now it’s gone (rbfirehose.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/bugs_in_services@sopuli.xyz
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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/41252781

12ft.io was a clever service that exploited the fact that paywalls allowed Google to crawl their articles. By licking the boots of Google’s crawler, paywalls pollute the search index with their exclusive/closed content. Enshitification culminates by getting paywalls in our search results.

12ft.io gave people direct access to Google’s caches, so we could read the text that feeds Google’s index.

☠ 12ft.io is apparently dead now. wtf. We just lost an important disenshification mechanism. The linked news hit ~½ a year ago, but seems to have taken some time to actually play out.

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[–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

It worked early on. But, the last several times I tried it, it didn't work. So, I stopped using it a couple of years ago.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 9 months ago*

    A couple yrs ago Google announced that it was discontinuing use of the caches. They were directly accessible and also accessible via 12ft.io. So loss of 12ft.io was expected at that point. But strangely I continued to enjoy access well after that announcement. I wasn’t sure what happened; wondered if it was just that Google discontinued caching new pages. It was a bit hit and miss.

    Google’s wording was bizarre because surely Google still needs the cache for indexing. I wondered if Google made a false statement where the reality was just removing public access to the caches, not actually discontinuing use of the caches.

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