But then how can we sell your email to our 1873 partners?

Come with me back to IRC land. The water's fine.

(Technically you should log in to nickserv, but that's it)

It's waxed and waned.

I remember when you had to log into everything, but there wasn't much to visit. Then people started using the Internet en mas and selling ads was the market maker. So you didn't need to log in, but you did get the most malicious JavaScript ever written trying to jam pop-ups under your cursor.

Now we've somehow managed to achieve the worst of both worlds

Unless it's got literally nothing of note on it, I try to make a habit to log into everything manually every time. Some sites find this "suspicious" and make me check my phone and email to get in, which can be a little annoying.

jesus fucking tell me about it. When the internet was the domain of the nerd doing cool shit because it was cool, instead of... ugh