zlacker

>>dang+31
Would we also need to carve out an exception for the typically vapid "announcement" articles advertising paywalled academic journal papers?

The announcement-mills (phys.org comes to mind but there are plenty of others including nature.com itself) are not really "original" sources, the papers are, but such announcement-advertisement articles are submitted regularly.

Finding the freely available pre-print and/or author provided copies without resorting to (ahem) other workarounds is a pain but useful.

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, it sucks, but losing that many substantive articles would suck worse. In the future, when someone doesn't understand this, please direct them to this thread or to HN's FAQ [1], which now makes this explicit.

Complaints about paywalls are off topic, so please don't post them. The spirit of HN is to discuss specific articles and avoid generic rehashing. Arguments about The Paywall Question are all the same. For an example of what we want to avoid, see [2]. For more on our thinking, see [3].

It's ok to ask how to read an article or to help other users by sharing a workaround. But please do this without going on about paywalls. Focus on the content.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

2. >>10178012

3. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...

>>jcr+(OP)
I'm reluctant to say that paywalls with no workaround should be banned outright, but obviously they're not covered by the "ok" policy.

Sometimes people post these and others respond with links to freely available versions, or articles about the work. In such cases we're happy to update the URLs.

We're not happy about announcement mills either (and those sites are penalized on HN), but that's arguably a separate problem.