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"Shared with you by a Times subscriber"

The "Gifter" is a Times subscriber. Subscribers can gift 10 articles a month to non-subscribers.

That doesn't answer the question. Will more people clicking the link help the person that shared the link somehow?

I don’t believe it does anything. Times just lets you share 10 non-paywalled stories/mo. It’s not like a referral link or anything.

It's clearly tied to the account that does the sharing, so internally they must track that. what they track that for is another question but I don't know the answer to that.

They track that so you don't share more than 10 stories a day.

The tinfoil hat is handy but jesus christ my dude.

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