It'd be interesting to, say, look at a number of sites which have gone paywall and see how that impact on HN front-page posts.
Off the top of my head, some of those would be:
- NYTimes
- WSJ
- Quora
- WaPo
- LA Times
If anyone has a handy list, especially with dates, I'd appreciate it.
Here's the top 40 "general news" sites with barplots by year. I know that NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, telegraph.co.uk, and possibly a few others have paywalls and may have implemented them over this period. Pastebin to spare readers here another monster text post, expires in a month:
- NY Times: ~August 2019
- BBC: none
- The Guardian: none
- Washington Post: June 2013. <>>5829206 > HN traffic actually rose. Tightened markedly in 2018: <https://web.archive.org/web/20171213135245/https://reason.co...>
- Reuters: April 2021 <>>26820053 >
- NPR: none
- CNN: none
- Slate: 2015 (International readers) <>>9821492 >
- Vice: none?
- LA TImes: Paywalled, 2012. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/la-times-paywall_n_1299997>
- CNet: none
- Yahoo: none
- SFGate: 2015 <https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/2sj78h/death_spira...>
- cbc.ca: none
- CNBC: none
- guardian.co.uk: none
- vox.com: none (though discussed)
- salon.com: none?
Mixed bag on impacts, though I suspect paywalls going up or tightening has a lot to do with FP story trends.