How about borrowing Subweb? I was about to share a Medium post, but just saw it's "Members only." So I won't share it. I'm doing more of that now. Even though I subscribe to Medium, the NYTimes, the LATimes, and the WSJ, I'm avoiding linking to them, unless there's an easy way to pull the piece out from behind the paywall. Doing this is an exercise on PITA reduction for readers. I also see a subscribers-only layer now formed on the Web. You can link to stuff on it, but only subscribers can see it. Does it have a name yet?
Thursday, 3 July 2025
6 responses to “Thursday, 3 July 2025”
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More and more things are, say, webwalled? As in, “I clicked the link but I got webwalled.” Not unlike being rickrolled.
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Folks on metafilter are good about either sharing gift links or archived links. But that doesn’t work for paywalled private blogs.
I like the idea that it’s like being rick rolled. I just give up. If you have something good to say why not make it public? If it’s private, just email it. Can we reprint smart thing from paywalled sites? Fair use quotations?
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Das über-Web?
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Think of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.
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I write Trends for O’Reilly Media, which is more or less a monthly link dump (with limited commentary). Like you, I don’t link to paywalled and subscribers-only articles, though this gets ambiguous when some sites are “you can view n articles for free.”
Subweb might be a good name for the subscribers-only web. Of the parasitic web — ?
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