It is a bit ironic that a paywalled article like this will have a top level comment with the archive link, which can then be easily scraped by AI (along with the comments)
Also interesting how sites like this are mainstream whereas a link to a site hosting an mp3 of pirated music wouldn’t be tolerated in discussion forums like this.
I think a big difference is that there’s no micro transactions or compulsory licensing for content, so it always feels patently unfair to buy a subscription to read one article.
In this case, it also seems like the paywall doesn't show up if you have JavaScript disabled, which I find strange, but lots of news sites are like that I think.
Actually, the team behind archive dot today in at least spiegel.de has premium accounts, I presume bought with anonymous credit cards.
You can see artifacts when their servers are at queue load and you see the URLs, a few resources have the JWT with the account details in the URL. IIRC the clearname of the account in the token is Masha Rabinovich, with an email account [email protected], an identity that has cropped up in various investigations [1][2].
