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I use FF and I paid for NYTimes. I was logged in, yet NYTimes constantly flagged my browser with a persistent captcha I couldn't bypass for months (across 2 dif
by dmix 1y ago
I use FF and I paid for NYTimes. I was logged in, yet NYTimes constantly flagged my browser with a persistent captcha I couldn't bypass for months (across 2 different machines). It thought I was a bot because of the privacy features. So I cancelled my subscription using my phone.
- Esophagus4 1y agoHa - I thought you were gonna say you switched browsers.
- dmix 1y agoI just found a way to bypass the paywall on a web browser when I want to read an article. Which I figured was a easier solution than emailing customer service over a technical matter (never fun).
- deltoidmaximus 1y agoIs 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?
- rpdillon 1y agoThe 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.
- kvirani 1y agoWe just down know from the outside how much revenue they would lose by redirecting that effort though.
- rpdillon 1y agoThat'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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235341 They actually published an op-ed criticizing Amazon for using dark patterns to prevent people from leaving Amazon Prime while they were using those exact same patterns themselves. https://www.nirandfar.com/cancel-new-york-times/ https://www.nirandfar.com/cancel-new-york-times/
- naIak 1y agoThey probably don’t want you paying once and using that subscription to scrape the website. Which is reasonable.
- gpvos 1y agoAgain, they have your login cookie and are already tracking what you've seen. Just start captcha'ing after several dozen articles per day.
- kube-system 1y agoI 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.
- bigbadfeline 1y agoThat's what early warnings are for. It's an easy problem to solve... except by the NYT.
- kube-system 1y agoHow 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].
- nutjob2 1y agoJust use Bypass Paywalls Clean. Paying for a subscription is up to you.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoI just open dev tools and look at the file in the network tab. You can read it the response sub-tab usually.
- abawany 1y agowhen I used to subscribe to the nyt, I had to block a few of their endpoints to kill the awful popups and etc. This, the further ads for paying subscribers, and a host of other issues led me to drop them as well though.