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Shouldn't hackernews have some policy of marking paywalled articles? Something like: [paywall] Mark Zuckerberg Asserts Control of Facebook, Pushing Aside Disse
by Isinlor 6y ago
Shouldn't hackernews have some policy of marking paywalled articles? Something like:
[paywall] Mark Zuckerberg Asserts Control of Facebook, Pushing Aside Dissenters
It would be very helpful to avoid getting irritated by the paywalls. And maybe collectively we could ignore paywalled sources.
- tomhoward 6y agoThe HN FAQs [1] state that paywalled articles are OK as long as there is a known workaround so everyone can read it, even if it takes a little effort. Someone usually posts a link to the workaround in the comments, i.e.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23028577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23028577 It's not ideal, but better than banning every site that might ever have a paywall, which, aside from leading to the loss of a big chunk of quality content, would create confusion relating to the fact that paywalls behave differently based on regions, previous site visits, click origins etc. So it's the least-worst solution. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- Isinlor 6y agoStill, it would be useful to have an indicator like [paywall], so that it's easy to avoid paywalled articles.
- tomhoward 6y agoI think Dang has long ago decided that wouldn't improve HN, and I tend to agree. Tagging an article as paywalled would imply that it's inaccessible to non-subscribers, which isn't true; inaccessible content is banned from HN. Paywalled content is only allowed if the paywall can easily be bypassed, so tagging it as paywalled would just cause more confusion, not less. Everyone accepts it's an imperfect situation. But it's still the least-worst situation.