Instapaper Blocked 9to5Mac

11 September 2012

As I speculated yesterday, 9to5Mac were not blocking the Instapaper bookmarklet. The site had been added to Instapaper’s publisher opt-out policy.

Marco Arment explains why it was him, and not 9to5mac, who instigated the opt-out: > The best way to prevent Instapaper from accessing 9to5Mac’s pages was to add them to the opt-out list. So I did that, thinking I’d let the dust settle and reevaluate that decision later once I had a better idea of how they felt about Instapaper.

As Marco admits, he overreacted, made a hasty decision, caused confusion and inconvenience for some of his users and probably didn’t do his reputation much good. But an explanation and an honest apology seems like a good recovery, to me.