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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178012
3. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...
I was thinking more of Elsevier, which actively sues websites that publish mirrors of papers (see https://torrentfreak.com/elsevier-cracks-down-on-pirated-sci...).
For two, declaring rules and then declaring that no-one is allowed to talk about said rules sets a very dangerous precedent.
For three, pretty darn ironic that both this and http://deathtobullshit.com/ are on the front page at the same time.
It's also easily derived from the values of this site, which are no secret (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179248) and have not changed.
I'm occasionally tempted to think that HN should in the same direction: no links whatsoever, everything is plain text. You want to read the article, you cut-and-paste. Or write your own browser extension, or whistle it into a cell-phone or something. Terrible for rapid reading, but would definitely cut down on the complaining about paywall tags. One-click links probably violate some Amazon patent anyway.
Taking it a step farther, all submissions must be done rot13. If you can't figure out how to translate a link to rot13 (or install an appropriate browser extension), maybe you shouldn't be posting here. Not because you are inherently unworthy, but because you haven't bothered to read and follow the instructions. The instructions could be given on the bottom of the guidelines page, and all improperly formatted submissions could redirect to the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel like it's either that, or more all-Erlang days:
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra
boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have
posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create
sites to get hired by Twitter.
And while you are at it, get off my lawn. :)
> they should figure out which of the 18 different workarounds they can use
Workarounds are a nuisance but this exaggerates it. Overwhelmingly these articles come from a small number of sites that have the same few workarounds. Most people have internalized them long ago (or installed software to do so), and for anyone who hasn't, it's fine to share info like "open an incognito window" or "google the article title" in the threads. What's not fine is to turn every thread into the same old argument about paywalls.
> what exactly can you flag
You should flag things that shouldn't be on HN in the first place. But a New Yorker article on, say, Nabokov and butterflies obviously should be on HN. (Obviously, that is, given the mandate and history of the site.) Articles on offbeat topics that lead outside HN's core grooves are the most endangered species here. We need more of those. Flagging them is an abuse of flagging. Sometimes people do that because of paywalls, even when the paywall has a trivial workaround like an incognito window. That's what I was referring to.
Intellectual diversity is the founding value of this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. That's what I meant re "getting" HN. But I'll try to be more helpful than dismissive when communicating it.
And many ads are paid per view, not per click.
Hit the "Raw" button on https://github.com/voltagex/hackernews-paywalltag/blob/maste... - linking directly is not a good user experience for anyone using GreaseMonkey