I wouldn’t quite call it a paywall. This article is free with an email sign up. They discussed this before and not sure I believe it but their reason/excuse for free email sign up was to combat AI scrapers. They noticed their articles were getting scraped by a few well known AI scrape and repost “news” sites.
404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.
I wouldn’t quite call it a paywall. This article is free with an email sign up. They discussed this before and not sure I believe it but their reason/excuse for free email sign up was to combat AI scrapers. They noticed their articles were getting scraped by a few well known AI scrape and repost “news” sites.
How long until somebody automates the scraping with throw-away email addresses?
Wrong question. How long ago, you mean.
That’s a bs reason, email paywall bypassing is so easy that it could just as well not exist.