Exactly, this is a dark pattern because it uses up the visitor’s bandwidth before dropping a paywall in front.
On a similar note it’s using unnecessary power (quite possibly from a battery of limited capacity) rendering a paywall with an effect nobody wants to see, except probably the people who made it.
There’s an easy solution:
HTTP response 402: payment required
HTTP 402 is like Hashcash[1] - greatly underrated and/or unknown, and yet extremely effective in solving its target problem.
In 402's case, if it was, say, legislated by the government, then the following would happen:
(1) Users wouldn't be bait-and-switch'ed by a paywall that revealed part of the content before appearing
(2) Companies would need to band together to implement a micropayments framework
(3) Lasseiz-faire maximalists wouldn't be able to complain because the only requirement would be that paywalls be signalled by an HTTP status code
The only potential downside is that companies might, instead of making a common micropayments API, instead just use Google, or even worse, not use any common platform and instead make consumers sign up for a new account for each site.
Agree 100% on the effectiveness and it being underrated.
Lightning Service Authentication Tokens[1] (LSATs) provide a standard that’s usable today.
With a Lightning Network browser integration like Alby[2] you can access paywalled content behind a proxy like Aperture[3], and it’s a very smooth process already.
On a similar note it’s using unnecessary power (quite possibly from a battery of limited capacity) rendering a paywall with an effect nobody wants to see, except probably the people who made it.
There’s an easy solution: HTTP response 402: payment required