Soft paywalls aren't, like many nouns that need an introducing qualifier (think homeopathic medicine for the most common example). More specifically, a soft pa

Soft paywalls aren't, like many nouns that need an introducing qualifier (think homeopathic medicine for the most common example). More specifically, a soft paywall isn't a starving artist trying to get their daily bread from valuable content (If they were I'd be biased to support them, because I'm among the smaller crowd around here that rather likes IP law and procing things, and kind of enjoy poking the gibs me dat for free beehive. I even probably support, horror of horrors, what I heard was Musk hard-paywalling twitter to make it profitable, and he's neither starving nor an artist), it's a malicious trick to hijack when you're trying to find free information on a subject by bait-and-switching a, say, promising quoted section from the middle of the article on a search result. It's like a digital used car salesman who promised a great deal or free benefit in an ad but is all out of non-full-price inventory once you drive all the way out to the lot. Until these sorts of sites stop shipping their whole catalog to be indexed as available while hiding behind ever-more-sophisticated ui barriers (or browser drm soon, maybe?) and firmly take an honest and upfront stance of either freely available to read or benefiting from paying customers I think the right stance is that silver beats gold; You only survive if you do unto others as they do unto you, so for as long as they're putting out bait we should take the worm and skip the hook: https://archive.ph/X3gHI https://archive.ph/X3gHI