FireFox has multiple extensions that are specifically made to bypass paywalls. No AI necessary.
Maybe they asked Quora if it was legal.
In all seriousness, though, I don’t get that site’s popularity. I only ever visit Quora by accident (because Google ranks it highly) and it’s basically always garbage answers. And speaking as a developer, the UI/UX causes my eyes to roll back in my head and say, “REDRUM” in a demonic voice. It’s hard to even tell where the answer is because there’s so much superfluous shit on the page.
Agreed on the UI/UX. Really awful and unintuitive
Now I have to go try it, so that I can go through this article’s paywall.
Did it work?
I don’t know if I had to do anything special for the prompt, but it just gave me a short summary starting with “Unfortunately I cannot provide the full text of the article you requested, as that would likely infringe on the copyright of the content. However, I can summarize the key points from the article.”
Quora should be respecting robots.txt, but also why are the NYT etc. serving the full article to the Quora bot anyway?
Usually NYT sets a cookie to track how many free articles you read and once you exceed that, you get the paywall. The bots probably don’t set/send the cookies, so NYT doesn’t block them. Also, I’d imagine the bots are coming from various different IPs so even server side blocking based on IP wouldn’t block everything and eventually the bot would get to the article. User Agents can also be spoofed.
