You see an interesting article headline with a lot of upvotes on the front page, and you proceed to click on it only to be greeted with a pay wall on getting to the web address, why are these sort of articles allowed to get to the front page in the first place?
The pay articles are often more timely and higher quality than the free news outlets. It seems only natural they’d get linked to from an aggregator geared to high quality discussion.
HN's policy on paywalls is outlined in the FAQ [1]. Private Browsing mode is generally a good workaround:<p>> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.<p>> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.<p>The rationale explained by dang in a 2015 post [2] makes sense:<p>> Publications like NYT, WSJ, the Economist, and the New Yorker have paywalls that leave ways for readers to work around them. Such stories are OK to post to Hacker News. Yes, this sucks, but the loss of many substantive articles would suck worse.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938</a>
Slightly off-topic: I'm having a feeling that in last months HN is getting flooded with links coming from big general news, newspapers portals like there's some kind of <i>content "promotion"</i> going on. Or maybe it's just me?
I don't want to completely deny them because some a genuinely interesting, but if there was a way to tag them accordingly (a paywall symbol, etc), I wouldn't be as annoyed when I go face-first into the wall without any warnings.
I think HN takes a pragmatic approach. There is quality news on those paywalled sites. They are paywalled because they need to pay professionals to write quality researched content (it isn’t some internet marketer trying to make a quick buck) so ethically it seems OK and there are workarounds.<p>I think there would be a natural balance in that a paywalled article needs to be even better than average to do well as fewer people can read it to upvote it. So hopefully when a paywalled article appears it’s better than average.<p>Medium.com is my only concern because they paywall run of the mill blog quality articles. I’d encourage people to post using a friends link in that case if they can get it.
one technique I rarely see mentioned is disabling javascript. Will get you around NYT paywall and others<p>But what I find ironic is HN as a whole seems to complain about both paywalls and ads. . . You have to pick one or the other<p>Perhaps it's two separate groups of people complaining though
Because HN is not place for poor people!<p>Just joking[0], it's mostly because a lot of these pay walled sites have a workaround for reading the article anyway.<p>[0] I am pretty sure I'll be downvoted for it, because it actually is mostly true.
Most of the time you can bypass by going into incognito mode / privacy mode in FF. Chrome is making it easier to bypass paywalls too: <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/google-chrome-update-incognito-mode-paywall-workaround.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/google-chrome-update-in...</a>
Because the audience here understands how to work around paywalls.<p>There's even a "web" link at the top of every article to help you, as having google as a referrer is one of many workarounds. Others include, incognito windows, multiple browsers or clearing your cookies, google cache, outline.com, archive.is, etc.<p>If there's an article that's been posted here, and it's being upvoted, you can be sure that people are reading it.<p>If you've tried everything you can think of, but still can't get to the content, just ask. Someone will likely assist you.
Many of these paywalled news sites can be accessed with the Bypass Paywalls browser extension:<p>Firefox (desktop & Android): <a href="https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox</a><p>Chrome (desktop): <a href="https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome</a><p>It's free and open source.
At which point will people start considering paywalls ads (which is what they are)? Siloed content should not enjoy the momentum of "previously unsiloed", and it's no different from content that has forever been siloed. They are functionally not much different from content marketing blogs.