Medium allows 3 premium stories per user for a non-member. You can access medium in two ways:
It is easy to implement restriction to premium stories for a logged in user as we can send 'userId' in a token for each request and keep a counter in the backend. What I found intruding is how do they implement this restriction when a non-logged in user?
Most of the time these kind of things are just limited by setting a cookie, or something in local or session storage and checked on load.
More advanced access systems may create a fingerprint of the machine by creating a hash of the IP address and machine specifications and make an API call upon load.
Gijo Varghese
A WordPress speed enthusiast
Any of their premium article can be opened without restrictions in Incognito mode!! ๐