WSJ's paywall, particularly against Archive Today, has been hardening markedly of late. I'm repeatedly seeing A.T. links posted which read "you have been block

WSJ's paywall, particularly against Archive Today, has been hardening markedly of late. I'm repeatedly seeing A.T. links posted which read "you have been blocked" or similar. Sometimes those resolve later, sometimes not. HN's policy is that paywalls are permissible where workarounds exist. WSJ is getting close to disabling those workarounds. The NYTimes similarly tightened its paywall policy a few years ago. A consequence was that its prevalence on the HN front page fell to ~25% of its prior value, with no change in HN policies (as reported by dang), just member voting patterns. Given the difficulty in encouraging people to read articles before posting shallow-take comments, this is a significant problem for HN, and the increased reliance of media sites on paywalls is taking its toll on general discussion. There are literally hundreds of news sites, and many thousands if individual sites, submitted to HN and making the front page annually. It would cost a fortune, not merely a small one, to subscribe to all of these.