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"We copied a summary of the article instead of the full text" - hostile UI design blocking quoting of an article I am trying to share with others (www.airdatanews.com)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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On mobile if I try to copy a paragraph or two to my web browser clipboard it literally won't on this website.

I assume this is because of AI scraping or whatever but this has got to be the most insulting, condescending UI design I have encountered in a long time.

I distinctly remember people laughing at me about saying this would happen....

Ughhh.

Also yes I know there are probably a million ways to get around this but the point is this is just so fucking pointlessly stupid.

This is what it looks like on android.

I wanted to share your article with an interesting quote I picked to add a personal touch and thus encourage people to read the full article you assholes, but ok fine I will never go to this website again.....

Oh wait but I can feed ALL of the text into Google's AI slop machine just by swiping down because of course I can still do that, that makes sense.

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[–] 2 points 5 days ago

You got one correct answer to the question asked, which is "why". And it has nothing to do with AI. This has been a thing on websites for 20 years - not many, but some. They use javascript to choose what to copy to the clipboard. As others noted, there are ways around it.

For the why? Well, to try and prevent precisely what you were doing.

There are ways of making it more difficult (impossible for the average or lightly-teched user) to save/copy images, for example. Some sites attempt to do that.

It's all a matter of trying to protect what they've published. Which is certainly legally their right. But is also pretty easy to get around - at least on desktop. I haven't had to bother on mobile, myself.

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