I think we need a serious discussion about paywall content.
Personally, I am very annoyed by paywall content and I would prefer to don't see it on HN.
I think that paywall content are a serious treat to the openness of the community.
I agree that content that isn't openly and globally available should be avoided.
The recent trend in paywalling is a negative one but it's not easy for any one aggregator (who isn't google) to punish the behavior. Consequently, a lot of a great content is paywalled.
(Though I agree that paywalled content is a nuisance, albeit with some granularity regarding the necessity of paywalls to continued access to quality reporting.)
>You should flag stories because of content, not provenance.
How can I flag a story because of its content when I am unable to view the content? If a story has no content for me, I will likely flag it, sorry.
If there is an easy alternative posted and the linkbait sounds compelling enough, I might try it.
Otherwise, it might get a flag for 'no content at this link'.
We've had this discussion ad nauseum. There will never be a consensus, but the HN question is settled. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
We all hate paywalls, but an HN without NYT, WSJ, The Economist, The New Yorker etc. would be much worse. These are sources of high-quality articles and intellectual curiosity is what HN tries to optimize for.
I'm thinking of adding the following to the FAQ to reduce the endless relitigation about paywalls that has been choking so many threads like a weed. Objections? Additions?
1. Paywalled articles are ok if there's a workaround.
2. It's ok to ask for a workaround in the thread and share one.
3. Generic paywall complaints about HN stories are off topic.The choice is between two bad options: having to do a bit of work and losing many substantive articles. For HN, it's obvious which is the lesser evil. The policy has been the status quo here forever.
Just so it's clear: this is a sure way to lose your flagging privileges on HN
HN is a little like startup investing in that missing out on good posts is the worst that can happen. Bad posts suck too, but flagging and moderation work.
Is there a recent trend? The situation has seemed stable to me for a long time.
The last big shift was the New Yorker switching to a ponywall (i.e. letting incognito windows work) which, whatever it did for their economics, made the web and HN way better. Nautil.us recently introduced a paywall, but they love HN and are letting HN traffic through.
Are you seriously suggesting that someone from YCombinator will remove an account's flagging privileges because the account flagged links which did not point to any meaningful content?
What should we be flagging? Links to content that we disagree with?
Can we have a community rule that every 3rd post doesn't end up with a thread where people hyperbolize how terrible/awful/eyebleeding the design and usability of some web page is and we never get to discussing the content? At times these threads almost becomes indistinguishable from crappy satire and often end up dominating the discussion...and quite often the sites are perfectly fine and somebody just doesn't like the font choice or is trying to read a long form article on their watch or something.