[acdha]

Also, scraping was a problem for publishers: if your site was popular, copy-cats would show up republishing your work with minimal credit.

That said, this seems quaint in the modern era where trillion-dollar tech companies are doing that to publishers now, too.

[donohoe]

No. That wasn’t a concern with RSS for publishers. Most publishers have RSS still or feeds. Scraping index pages continues to be trivial.

[acdha]

Yes, it was a concern. You can say that some people made their peace with it but if you’d been there at the time, it was absolutely mentioned.