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?
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.
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.
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.
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.