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Comment by illegalmemory | Hacker News Reader

One of the little feature of reader mode I love is, if you time it correctly (before loading all javascript of the page) you can skip a lot of prompts ( subscribe to read / monthly limit reached and so on )

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Try hard refreshing the page after you're in reader mode.

It's only a matter of time before sites start rolling out anti-reader mode "features."

It's already been done. Wired, for instance, only shows you the first paragraph of a story until you've made an account and logged in, even in reader mode.

Surely that's just any halfway-competent pay/sign-up wall, rather than specifically anti-reader mode?

Not necessarily as they still want to be referenced properly.

The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and remove the paywall for those but with the progress of other search engine / social nets it's more complicated to paywall without hurting SEO.

> The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and remove the paywall for those

Isn't that against Google's own policies? I think they call it cloaking.

For sites dependent on link-aggregator sites (such as HN, Tildes, Mastodon, Diaspora, etc.)[1] for spreading and sharing content, hard paywalls tend to very strongly discourage further readership and sharing.

I'm aware that HN has multiple levels of penalties applied to sites / domains, for various reasons. Users may also flag inaccessible content. (I certainly do.)

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Notes:

1. If you've determined that "etc." is doing much heavy lifting here, congratulations. The resources listed are highly encouraged.

If you wanna split hairs, sure. "Breaking reader mode" is a component of an access wall. For a while a lot of sites didn't have that, so reader mode would work to skip all that.

I stopped using these modes years ago because of inconsistent results that I assume must be from reader-blocking tech.

I stopped using those sites, instead. I figure that if they're so far up in themselves that they want to employ such user-hostile design, I'm probably not missing much if I just move on and read something else.

It's already happenning. Just like adblockers, anything that makes life better for users is actively fought against.

If you're on Firefox, there's an extension called Auto Reader Mode which saves you the game of "click reader mode before the popups appear."

Though I guess this extension is less useful now that many sites are purposely breaking reader mode.

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