How a Google side project evolved into a $4B company | Hacker News Reader

How a Google side project evolved into a $4B company

techcrunch.com

19 pointsshreyanshd17 comments

Last years book "Never Lost Again" is a good account of the Keyhole/Google Earth/Google Maps story. (https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0062673041/)

TechCrunch has never been a good source of tech news - even from its Michael Arrington's days. But now it's even worse.

First time coming across techcrunch's "extra crunch" paywall - It's a shame they give you half the article before mentioning it.

I guess my AdBlocker blocked whatever they were trying to use to show the paywall, so the story just abruptly ended in the middle.

Same. I use uBlock Origin, and the article just fades out in the centre...

Seeing as the other comments mention this website hijacking the back button and other nasties, I don't think I'm going to whitelist this site in uBlock to test, even temporarily.

Interesting side-note for anyone seeing a paywall, if you set Safari to only ever use reader mode on techcrunch URLs it appears to bypass that completely.

Got a few paragraphs in before finding out it's behind a paywall that's only accessible from a few countries.

Paywall alert. The article does not mention till very late that it's paywalled.

What a horrible site, it tries to hijack the back button, full screen cookie warning and uBlock has over a dozen items blocked.

Not only that, the GDPR settings take what is seemingly an infinite amount of clicks to actually see the options, and then you can't even properly opt out.

That was enough for me to skip this one.

It's so bad that I have stopped reading TechCrunch articles. The options for GDPR consent are excruciatingly painful to choose and takes a large time to even get to the appropriate point.

https://outline.com/KhBGXC

This does not have the full story, only the free preview text.

Techcrunch links should be banned imo..

You are not alone.

Why?

Well for one they hijack browser behavior. Their site is a train wreck of “me too” JavaScript development.

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