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.

>>dang+v4
My concern is with the interaction of the "original source" rule and the "ok for paywalls with workarounds" rule preventing most articles on new research. The "original source" papers are often locked behind paywalls (or embargoes) when the insipid announcement mill advertisement articles start appearing. Even supposedly reputable official university press sites are thoroughly guilty these overtly promotional teaser articles. The trouble is, lightweight advertisement articles are often the only things we can (legally) access when the "news" first becomes public.

As much as I hate to admit it, the sad state of suckage for announcement mills (including university press sites) actually does have some minor advantages; which would you be more inclined to read and up-vote?

"Astronomers detect furthest galaxy yet with Keck telescope"

or

"Lyman-Alpha Emission From A Luminous Z=8.68 Galaxy: Implications For Galaxies As Tracers Of Cosmic Reionization"

Non-Astronomers would be lucky if they understand the details presented in just the abstract of the paper, and I say this as a non-astronomer who does _NOT_ understand all of said details. Reading original source papers takes far more effort than reading lightweight announcements, and this gets to the fundamental question of, "What do we want HN to be?"

The status quo of interested HN users finding and comment-linking to the original source papers (if available) on the puff-piece stories is a lot of manual work and some stuff gets missed, but it really does tend to work out reasonably well. If we forbid paywalls without workarounds and require original sources, then we will miss out on a lot of great new research. Besides infringement, there is no easy answer for this situation.