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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 ba

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?

rpdillon 11mo ago
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.
- kvirani 11mo ago
  We just down know from the outside how much revenue they would lose by redirecting that effort though.
  - rpdillon 11mo ago
    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://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 11mo ago
They probably don’t want you paying once and using that subscription to scrape the website. Which is reasonable.
- gpvos 11mo ago
  Again, 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 11mo ago
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.
- bigbadfeline 11mo ago
  That's what early warnings are for. It's an easy problem to solve... except by the NYT.
  - kube-system 11mo ago
    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].

rpdillon 11mo ago

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.

kvirani 11mo ago
We just down know from the outside how much revenue they would lose by redirecting that effort though.
- rpdillon 11mo ago
  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://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 11mo ago

They probably don’t want you paying once and using that subscription to scrape the website. Which is reasonable.

gpvos 11mo ago
Again, 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 11mo ago

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.

bigbadfeline 11mo ago
That's what early warnings are for. It's an easy problem to solve... except by the NYT.
- kube-system 11mo ago
  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].