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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Technology
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Do we want free articles on the internet? Like we've had for the past 30 years until some publications decided in the last 5 years to start paywalling everything?
Yes. Yes I do want free articles on the internet. And once upon a time, publishers actually wanted my eyeballs on their free articles.
Once upon a time, social media didn't exist. Once upon a time, people bought newspapers. Many things have changed over the decades that led to the media industry adopting paywalls and a subscription-based business model. 404 Media is unusual in that it continues to provide free articles to those who subscribe to its email newsletter, which I think is a fair trade.
That's not unusual at all. What's unusual is for a small publisher like 404 to demand an email address before letting you view their articles. Personally, it means I don't read them.
That's not how 404 started, though. For the first five months it allowed people to view its articles for free. Then it was discovered people were using bots to scrape the articles, paraphrase them with AI and then republish them elsewhere without giving credit. So they introduced an email subscription to counter this. This was explained in great detail on their website at the time.