"If 'activism' disappears behind a paywall and you still think it's activism, never submit to the temptation to take an IQ test."
“Annoying”, “infuriating”, “irate”… Just some of the language that's regularly used with regard to the discovery of gated content at the dark end of a social media link. Links to content that the vast majority of people can't access have now reached spam-wave volume on social platforms, as money-focused publishers line up to cash in on the lucrative new craze.
The practice has generally slipped through the spam net so far, but an ever-rising proliferation of what to most people are dead links, makes for an extremely poor user-experience on the Social Web. And worse, the inaccessibility of the content is promoting the spread of misinformation, as wildly exaggerated, trickbait titles become “reference works” in themselves, without the tempering effect of body text.