12ft.io was a clever service that exploited the fact that paywalls allowed Google to crawl their articles. By licking the boots of Google’s crawler, paywalls pollute the search index with their exclusive/closed content. Enshitification culminates by getting paywalls in our search results.
12ft.io gave people direct access to Google’s caches, so we could read the text that feeds Google’s index.
☠ 12ft.io is apparently dead now. wtf. We just lost an important disenshification mechanism. The linked news hit ~½ a year ago, but seems to have taken some time to actually play out.
