Dear New York Times: Your tireless efforts to make me stop reading you are having the desired effect.
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Dear New York Times:
Your tireless efforts to make me stop reading you are having the desired effect.
For some time, I’ve ignored your insipid login requirements, taking the trouble to go through the Google backdoor to get the full text of your articles if I wanted to continue reading after the teaser. Now, you’re making it harder, greeting me with this insipid screen whenever I click a link to your content:
It’s just not worth it anymore.
Best wishes,
James
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I understand that it can be annoying, but think about what you’re saying for a moment:
A registration process that takes less than a minute is not worth it in order to have free access to one of the finest news sources in the world.
I swear, one of these days we’ll hear somebody visit a newspaper website and say “You’re only giving me free news? I want free news AND a sandwich! This is an outrage!”
TG,
You have to compare it to the rest of the marketplace. Most of the biggies let you access content easily. Those who don’t are at a disadvantage.
Having to sign up for a site and provide them information with which to spam me and then log in every single time I encounter one of their pages is more than I’m willing to endure when there are a dozen other sources out there with comparable content.
I don’t get spammed (or don’t get inconvenienced by it, anyway) since the only email address I gave them was one that I use solely for these purposes. Surely you’ve got a spam address that you give away to people, right?
And I don’t have to log in every time. Granted, I don’t have as many combinations of computers and browsers as you seem to, but it still only requires a onetime login per combo.
I understand your frustration, but IMHO free access to the Times is worth a minor inconvenience. Especially for a blogger like you, who is now saying that either you won’t be posting anything about NYT stories or you’ll be posting about stories that you won’t have read (given what you said in the Greenwald thread, I’m guessing you’ll go with the latter. Which means that you’ll have pesky commenters coming in and saying “If you’d read the article, you would know that _____ “) These don’t seem like good options to me.
