iOS Safari's reader mode heuristics has always been mediocre at best, and it's getting less useful by the day as more publications knowingly cripple it. It used to be that you can get around some soft paywalls with reader mode, especially if you turn on "Use Reader Automatically" which distills the content before JavaScript kicks in to remove it. Nowadays that works on fewer and fewer commercial websites, and the other day I noticed something truly shocking on a pretty mainstream tech publication (don't remember which one unfortunately): I can see like two paragraphs of content before the paywall, but when I turn on reader mode, the content shown is literally a list of Christmas laptop deals (that is not visible on the non-reader page), with the title being the only relevant thing.

The ai detected it was talking poorly about it and decided to retaliate.