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Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
Frequently finding upvoted links to paywalled news sites, which usually ends up in a search for a similar article from a free news source. How much time could we save each other by not linking to paywalls?
- medymed 7y agoAnother option would be a convention to add a tag that the article is paywalled.
- cloudking 7y agoThat sounds like a reasonable alternative, good idea
- noodlesUK 7y agoI think this is a great idea. It’d stop me from constantly clicking on items that I can’t read, without affecting the discourse on HN.
- kelnos 7y ago... and ideally a way to optionally filter out all paywalled sites from the homepage.
- zooweemama 7y agoI agree, this would be a good compromise.
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- Austin_Conlon 7y agoSo what if media outlets charge money for good journalism? Move on.
- camillovisini 7y agoOutline.com - however, it does not work on some sites, e.g. WSJ...
- shenal 7y agoarchive.is works for most of the sites
- imgabe 7y ago> How much time could we save each other by not linking to paywalls? Not very much? How much time do you really spend clicking "Back" after hitting a paywall? Most have very simple workarounds and/or someone will post an archive or outline link in the comments.
- kelnos 7y agoIt's not just about wasting time. Often a headline will interest me, click, oops, nope, can't read it. Some stories certainly are genuinely unique to a particular news site, but often most of the NYT/WSJ/etc. articles posted aren't exactly high-quality and something very similar can be found on CNN, AP, etc.
- imgabe 7y agoThis is where the aforementioned workarounds come in.
- kelnos 7y agoMany workarounds have stopped working, due to incognito mode detection or other means. Regardless, I shouldn't have to waste my time digging around to find a working workaround when the submitter could have taken a few minutes to see if there's a similar-quality article covering the same topic on a free site. While I'll occasionally click on an archive.is link, ethically (and legally) it's not great to mirror someone else's paid content for free.
- imgabe 7y agoI don't think any of us are sitting around reading articles on HN because we're optimally using our time. I'd rather know an article exists and see if there's a means to read it than never hear about it. Unless it's a piece of breaking news, there's probably not another equivalent source. It's unlikely some other source performed the exact same in-depth investigation with the same quality into whatever the paywalled piece is about.
- colechristensen 7y agoWhy should we stop linking paywalled articles and not books or software or other non free things?
- mkl 7y agoAn article is a few minutes, and we get way more out of those other non-free things. If there was a way to pay e.g. 10c to read just that article, I would do it without much thought if the opening paragraphs told me it was worth my time, but I'm not subscribing and paying every month for 0-2 articles per week that I might care about. I just move on.
- jammygit 7y agoCompanies need to make money somehow. If not with paywalls, it’s harder for them to avoid monetizing by tracking and advertising
- imgabe 7y agoI assume that the companies with paywalls still advertise and track on top of that (one reason I refuse to pay for them).
- jammygit 7y agoYes, that is very unfortunate. Ars Technica at least will disable trackers on paying members
- madsbuch 7y agoYes, but that does not imply we have to post content from sites that need to make money on their content.
- tschellenbach 7y agoIs anyone experimenting with other models than personalized advertising or paywalls?
- oconnore 7y agoCommunity discussion seems like an interesting vehicle for article micro-payments. Could someone try to negotiate a pooled deal with the WSJ based on a valid HN cookie with >X internet points? Or just a single subscription with the agreement that it would be scraped and self-hosted by the community?
- catchmeifyoucan 7y agoI like this. Would be cool to start a HN News fund
- catchmeifyoucan 7y agoThinking more about implementation - although users could use micro-transactions among themselves, providers might be more inclined to opt-in if we offered to pay by block. For example, if a paywall article starts ranking up, we could let the provider know to remove the paywall for certain duration. Kind of like a scheduled spot instance on a Cloud VM. I bet there's a flag that toggles paywalls on articles and is easier for providers to implement than restrictive access. Using our fund - we could then pay the provider. Assuming that an average top HN post gets 10K views - and each user pays $.05 per viewing. That makes a total of $500. We would give the provider an upfront payment of say $500 dollars based on estimations. A $20 contribution to the fund means almost 400 articles [enough for more than a year] on front-page paywalled subscriptions for a user. So the spiel to providers are - we'll pay you $500 for 6 hours of free article read time. That's all they need to know. We handle collecting funds on our side from actual readers. It's actually genius because content providers can write and support articles catered to a particular community and are incentivized because they don't have to worry about conversion of users to paid subscribers.
- sk55 7y agoI dig this idea as well.
- flukus 7y agoHow many paywall sites have half decent forums/discussions? It seems like that's the sort of thing they could leverage to drive their subscriptions, kind of like how the letters to the editor section used to get used. At the moment this is outsourced to twitter/facebook/reddiit/etc and they get no revenue from it.
- sk55 7y agoI think it's worth paying for good quality journalism. It's nice to support the institutions that serve a vital role to the checks and balances of our democracy. Also, some of you may not know it but you can access the news for free through your local library. For example, I get the NY Times online via the Santa Clara County Library.
- kelnos 7y agoI agree with that in general, but which site or sites? I honestly don't read any particular news source enough to justify giving them as much as they ask. The intro rates seem to be pretty low for many, but then after 3 or 6 months they bump up to $15-$30/mo. I can't justify spending that much to read even 5-10 articles per month per site.
- borski 7y agoI did not know this! I would totally do this instead of going around them! Do you have more info on this? (I do pay for those I really like, but for those in which I only read an occasional article or two, I don’t particularly feel like subscribing)
- sk55 7y agoHere are the details for Santa Clara County Library https://sccld.org/emagazines-news/?_ga=2.59104363.719460146.1581470184-1919441446.1580196296 https://sccld.org/emagazines-news/?_ga=2.59104363.719460146....
- AndrewUnmuted 7y agoThis is a link aggregation service, though. The OP is not really weighing in on the value of pay walls, nor whether or not they actually ensure "good journalism." The issue being raised here is that posting pay-walled links increases friction for, I would imagine, the overwhelming majority of users of the site. I wouldn't expect people from, say, India, or even Brazil, to be able to get the NYT from their public libraries. They have their own newspapers to subsidize.
- madsbuch 7y ago
- pmontra 7y agoI agree with you but maybe the poster of the link sometimes forgets to be posting a paywalled page. In any case, how about making the HN submit page check the URL against a list of well known paywalls and warn the poster? There is a short list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Websites_utilizing_paywalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Websites_utilizing_pa... and a longer one at https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
- flukus 7y agoAbsolutely. They are perfectly entitled to put their content behind a paywall but they want to freeload off the open web driving traffic to their sites as well, they're parasites. Might also lift discussions standards (pot meet kettle) if everyone could RTFA.
- kelnos 7y agoAbsolutely agree. I don't begrudge news sites for charging to keep the lights on, but IMO HN as a community shouldn't be driving traffic to paid sites, especially since there will always be quite a few people who can't read any given article... who is going to have a subscription to 3, 4, 5, 6 or more news sites? That gets expensive quickly.
- ronenlh 7y agoI believed that if the news outlet breaks the news that should be the link, even if paywalled. Free news outlets just paraphrase after it. There could be a correlation of it being a pivotal article and having a paid business model.
- madsbuch 7y agoA lot of comments point to the fact that companies need to make money on the articles they publish. However, a lot of interesting and cool stuff is posted outside of the realms of professional journalism. I mostly come here for the cool new product, an interesting blog article, or a research paper. In my opinion, corporate journalism is more noise than good content here.
- harikb 7y agoWhy don’t we, as HN community, find a solution to pay for content before we take away the only legitimate, non-intrusive way to make a living from journalism. Remember Jamal khashoggi could have decided to become a software engineer and could have been drinking the SF koolaid instead of sacrificing his life.
- anorman728 7y agoPersonally, I agree. I have no problem with paywalls, and actually subscribe to one paid site and wouldn't mind subscribing to more. But it can be pretty irritating for an aggregator. I go to paid sites individually, not from an aggregator.
- tomhoward 7y agoYou should look up the many comments about this topic by HN moderator Dang: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20paywall%20workaround&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20paywall%20workaround&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... The decision (and community consensus) is that paywalled sites are OK if there is a known workaround. Usually someone will post a workaround in the comments. Usually the workaround involves https://archive.is https://archive.is. If none exists, the article shouldn't be on HN and you should flag it. Longtime HN users accept that this is the least-worst resolution to the issue. The more-worst version would be that nothing with a paywall is ever allowed, meaning that content from some of the world's leading publications (NY Times, Washington Post, The Economist, WSJ) would never be seen here. HN could never claim to be a place for discussing the most important topics if those publications were excluded.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoCan we? I'm sure it's possible. Will we? Probably not. FYI: F12 > application > clear all site data works like 80% of time.
- ryandvm 7y agoSooo... not to rag on HN or anything, but this seems like the kinda thing that ought to be implemented as a user profile preference (e.g. a pay-wall boolean or perhaps even a whitelist). Because without getting into a philosophical debate, whether or not a user is interested in seeing submissions that are behind a paywall is most definitely a user preference.
- stillbourne 7y agoHow dare people ask for money.
- dang 7y agoIf there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... If you're seeing paywalled articles where there was no workaround, please let us know (hn@ycombinator.com is best). But if you're seeing paywalled articles with workarounds, that's normal. Please don't post about it, since it's off-topic and has been discussed many times. We all know the paywalls suck. It's just that HN would suck worse without NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc., articles.
- kemonocode 7y agoPlease allow a paywall tag of some kind then, and a listing of common workarounds somewhere. Then I'm sure the amount of threads about this would decrease by a lot.