Comment by deltoidmaximus
8 hours ago
Is there a reason to force all these bot checks on logged in accounts that are paying you money other than insanity? Surely you could just have a max monthly bandwidth limit per account and just stop worrying about this?
The New York Times is like a microcosm of the publishing industry. They seem to spend the majority of their effort on protecting their intellectual property. I'd rather they use those resources to improve their reporting, particularly about technical topics, but alas.
We just down know from the outside how much revenue they would lose by redirecting that effort though.
That's fair. I was a little bit sloppy with my previous comment; I was mentally conflating their lawsuits about intellectual property with their dark patterns that prevent people from unsubscribing. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but five years ago they were a nightmare to disentangle yourself from.
https://www.nirandfar.com/cancel-new-york-times/
I don't think there is any value of [x] for the monthly bandwidth usage you could pick that malicious users cannot afford, but legitimate users could not hit.
That's what early warnings are for. It's an easy problem to solve... except by the NYT.
How would a warning fix the problem?
"Hi, I see you've read [x-y] amount of news of new this month, we're going to cut you off at [x]"
What's the correct value of x?
If [x] is greater than or equal to the total amount of news published, then scrapers need one account.
If [x] is less than the total amount of news published, then you have now made it so legitimate subscribers cannot read all of the news.
Also, you have made things easier for scrapers, because they can determine how many accounts they need by dividing the total amount by [x].
They probably don’t want you paying once and using that subscription to scrape the website. Which is reasonable.
Again, they have your login cookie and are already tracking what you've seen. Just start captcha'ing after several dozen articles per day.