[moonshinefe]

I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall geeksforgeeks being ok a few years ago. But I've started avoiding it because it seems like there's multiple nag screens in a row whenever I make the mistake of clicking. Seems a lot of people agree.

Is the issue here these sites aren't putting up the barriers to the crawlers, and are getting high ranking in all the results despite all the friction to normal users? It'd be nice if there were a way for a search engines to tell if paywalls / nag screens are a thing on sites and to demote them from the results accordingly.

It seems like it wouldn't be hard for them to tell, but maybe they don't want to de-rank sites with these patterns. But really, from the consumers' perspective, who wants these sites in the results? I'm all for subscribing to something if I use it repeatedly, but that doesn't describe 90% of the sites I visit and I don't have the money for 1000 subscriptions.

Maybe they could just have a filter to filter for free sites only. I don't know what the solution is, but having blocked domains while nice is just a band-aid.