[ineptech]

Like I said, I understand the sentiment in the abstract. But my actual experience is that many good quality essays are often preceded by a gimme-yer-email popup. That's not causal - popups don't make content better - but it does seem correlated, possibly because the writers who are too principled to try to build an audience without email lists already gave up.

[tavavex]

I'm not sure if I relate to the sentiment - in my experience, everything nowadays asks with mailing list ads. Every website from high-quality blogs to "Top 10 Best Coffee Makers in Winter 2024" referral link mills asks for your email. Worst thing is, many of them are already moving onto the "next big thing", which are registration gates. I feel like a huge portion of all Medium-hosted posts are already unreachable to guests because of that.