We Need Your Email Address (opens in new tab)

This is an interesting piece that pulls back the covers on some of the threats to journalism today, even if I really dislike the strategy they've arrived at.

(I'm not giving my email address. We really need a better replacement for Patreon.)

I’m not convinced. My inbox for blogs is RSS reader. If you need to baywall your content that’s fine. However, the way 404 does it doesn’t seem like a viable solution to the stated problem. 404 has a free plan that give access to some content. It’s trivially easy to turn an email into a webpage/RSS. There are a plenty of free tools for that on the internet. It’s also next to no-effort-easy to get an email account on GMail. They don’t even check for the most popular temp email services so they don’t even make it moderately hard to bypass this email-gate.

The purpose of a system is what it does. It states that it’s to protect their content from AI but it’s trivially easy to bypass. So what we have is another email collector.

They have this on their Privacy Policy (prominently featured in the top menu) as the first sentence:

> Your privacy is critically important to us.

I feel like email collection is inherently in conflict with this stement. Thre are other ways to verify a viewer is not an AI. Like one of those ridiculous mini-game captchas out there. They are annoying but they can be implemented in a privacy-respecting manner. And AIs can’t do them well yet.

I'm okay with having to login ... if I can get a personal RSS feed that I can load into my RSS reader (instead of having to get my email spammed with articles).

Is the idea that having a login wall will keep AI bots from scraping the site? Because that seems like something that won't hold...?