I think a lot of people don't realize the answers are at the bottom, so they click on the link, see the request to register/pay to see the posts, and immediately back up, cursing the pseudo-paywall.
By the way, if you scroll ALL the way down to the bottom of any question page you do see the best answer. Apparently they bank on the fact most people won't scroll that far and get discouraged by the "paywall" on the top. The Google crawler requires the text to be visible I've heard
Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...
Me too, it popped up like last week and was the only result I could find (I already moved from DDG to Google because the results were irrelevant with any keyword combination I could make) and the answer was, like on stackoverflow, some "accepted" kind of answer (so marked by the person who asked the question). All posts were readable except that one: for the marked-as-answer post, you had to pay.
They've certainly moved on from scrolling down to see the answer...
And at least at some point, it was only there if you had a google referer header. Navigating directly to the page in question wouldn't show you the answers at all.
I've seen people say this before - how do you mean "at the bottom". Every page I have seen highlights the "accepted answer" in green and does ask you to pay to access it..... am I missing a workaround?
I think they may have had a google-wall: if you came from google you could scroll down to the content, but if you were just browsing the forum you couldn't see the answers.
So true. I ask a question on the paid support plan and I got an answer copied from a blog I already googled. After several back and forth and escalations, I keep getting the same unhelpful answers and gave up.
If I recall correctly, it used to be the case that they only showed the answer to Googlebot and if you wanted it, you actually did have to pay (or perhaps forge your useragent)
They didn't just hide it below the fold. They made it look like it wasn't there at all, by showing blurred-out content first, along with text along the lines of "subscribe to see the answers".
Any reasonable person not aware of the trick would believe they had to pay for the answer.
My understanding from speaking with former PM's is they moved their sign-up-to-view "paywall" from the first page you view to the second page, at least when you come from a social network or search engine. That obviously increases the relevance and search score when the answer is high quality.
Whoa, I never noticed that the real answers were at the bottom of the page!
But anyway, I assumed a site that looks "commercial" and secretive like that would probably have crappy answers. I'm wary of the "What's in my hand?" tactic.
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