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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

This is hilarious and makes so much sense. God, the internet is broken

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How are they not getting absolutely destroyed by the Google search algos, since that’s the definition of cloaking: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Big players like LinkedIn, Facebook, et all play by different rules. Losing LinkedIns results would damage Google.

Half the reason I use Qwant is it works better than LinkedIn's paid search results. Google does much worse.

The content is pretty much the same if you log in. Google doesn’t seem to care in instances like this, I’ve worked on multiple very large sites that do the exact same thing (further in so e instances: present a JS app to users and a faster JS—less experience to google). Many news sites do it too, for example.

Pretending to be a robot, in order to not get caught by robots. Kinds makes sense. In a sci-fi dystopian way.

This should help:

https://sumtips.com/software/browsers/set-user-agent-on-a-pe...

Hm, nothing for Android - for either ff or chrome?

It's been reported[0] that Firefox Nightly has a Debug menu through which one can bless a custom collection of allowed extensions to get around the new Mozilla Nanny State™ but I haven't personally expended the energy to try it

0 = https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...

You may be looking for iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome, the chrome repo has the firefox extension as well, fyi.

Darn, it actually works! Thank you a lot for the mention.

Those Windows 7 screenshots evoke a sense of nostalgia for the time before a Windows that broadcasts and monetizes my every action. I think an even bigger “fuck you” pattern is when an OS that I paid for tracks me and monetizes my private information.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

Nope; Windows is getting old :-P

Time to switch to another OS. Consider some newbie-friendly Linux, like Mint (linuxmint.com).

Agreed. I am a Mint user and I couldn't be happier. I switched around one year and a half ago because I was concerned about the constant data transfer (increasingly harder to deactivate) between my devices and Apple/MS. I was also sick of seeing unwanted ads and notifications both in Windows and Mac.

Personally I'm on Devuan because of my aversion to systemd, otherwise it would be mint for me.

Does Google not check for this at all? They could easily spoof their User-Agent to see if sites lie about what they show.

I dunno, folks might get salty if google's bots used misleading useragents. And it just escalates the existing cat&mouse game

Bing seems to have figured it out just fine.

My guess is nobody cares about this issue at Google for whatever reason, either because no compensation is tied to it or they are getting paid to push Pinterest.

Because reddit and google have the same political bent, and aren't competitors.

Google already explicitly discourages “cloaking”.[0] They define it as:

> Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

You’d think they’d do something about it. Maybe it’s because Reddit doesn’t cloak necessarily, but when it straight up refuses to show without the app (sometimes), I’d call that cloaking (in spirit). News sites throwing up paywalls would fit that too.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Yup. Googlebot can also traverse some paywalls

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