OpenAI has disabled the Browse with Bing feature in ChatGPT to prevent users from bypassing paywalls and accessing website information without making a subscription first.

  • Frellwit
    link
    English
    341 year ago

    I’m wondering why websites keep using fake paywalls when they can use a real one where the content isn’t available until user verification.

    • @UESPA_Sputnik
      link
      English
      381 year ago

      They do that to let search engines index their articles. Then they switch on the paywall an hour later or so but still get a lot of traffic (which is good for advertising) when people click on the link on Google etc.

      • @15liam20
        link
        English
        121 year ago

        The crawler identifies itself as a “robot” which can get past the paywall. When you browse using Chrome the site behaves differently. That’s why it’s so easy to get past by pasting the link into archive.ph

        • lemmyvore
          link
          fedilink
          English
          5
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Or by using a browser addon that changes the way the browser identifies itself to pretend it’s a search engine crawler.

    • lemmyvore
      link
      fedilink
      English
      15
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      They’d like to allow search engines and block (non-paying) visitors, but they took a lazy approach to it.

      The correct approach would indeed be to identify paying visitors (user+password) and search engines correctly (secret key), then they can reliably shut down everyone else.

      But that would require Google to cooperate and I suspect they don’t want to set a precedent where they let a website dictate how they get content. They like to deal from an all or nothing position.

      Of course there are other methods, such as making public just enough about the article to be relevant in searches, but I don’t know why they don’t do that. Probably lowers their SEO effectiveness if I were to guess.

    • Ferris
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      America’s Test Kitchen used to substitute their article text with a bunch of Lorem Ipsum, but I can’t tell whether they are still doing it without a laptop in front of me.