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12ft.io is critical to disenshitification and netneutrality. Now it’s gone (rbfirehose.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/disenshittify@lemmy.cafe
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cross-posted from !netneutrality@sopuli.xyz

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. “404 page not found”. 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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[–] 1 point 8 months ago

Ugh. I usually downrank/block paywall sites in Kagi.

Interesting to learn that the Google caches have the full article. I wonder if this needs to be a website or if there could just be a browser plugin to redirect you to the cache... 🤔

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