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On mobile, for me at least, the text content of this article disappears when the page has fully loaded. Anyone else? This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of thing happen

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economist.com brilliantly bans you from accessing their site after you've clicked a few of their links. The text vanishes because they've sloppily hacked this limitation in client-side by checking a cookie after the page finishes loading. This leaves 99% of visitors thinking that the site is broken, so they leave without ever noticing the message about how they need to pay a ransom to unban themselves.

For sites like this, you can sometimes archive the URL to evade the ban.

http://archive.is/Ni7Lo

OT: I think it is a bit of a jump to equate subscribing to paying a ransom.

I hate how supermarkets hold food ransom. Greedy

It's a bit like a ransom when they load the article at first, you start reading, and then the text disappears asking for payment. Fortunately, The Economist seems to just use cookies so you can still view the articles incognito.

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