4 ms·

Kills me that otherwise intelligent consumers are unwilling to pay for something as expensive to create and as high quality as the new york times. Makes me wan

Kills me that otherwise intelligent consumers are unwilling to pay for something as expensive to create and as high quality as the new york times. Makes me want to give up on product development altogether. Seriously -- if that's not good enough, what will be?

jkonowitch 14y ago
There's a really pernicious attitude of permissiveness, even encouragement, towards theft and evasion of payment for digital goods in many of pockets of online culture. It is disheartening.
- voodoomagicman 14y ago
  The idea of theft of 'digital goods' is absurd. Goods are defined as "commodities that are tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as they are produced". Theft is defined as "the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" Access to New York Times articles is not a tangible commodity, and bypassing the paywall in no way deprives the New York Times company of access or of a unit of access to the article.
  - uno7 14y ago
    What's being stolen here is revenue. i.e. money. Money is "tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as it is produced." Even if by your definition this isn't stealing, you have to admit that you are in fact circumventing the way NYT is attempting to make money for their hard work. The fact is you are stealing from the people who create the content, those maintain it online, etc. Do you intend to deprive the rightful owner of this money? Probably not, but you are still doing it even if that's not your intention. btw, not trying to single you out, specifically. It's more of a figurative "you"
mmastrac 14y ago
I'd have no problem paying for it if it was a significant part of my life. I generally just skim the majority of the non-technical articles on HN, not paying attention to who the provider is. Apparently I've clicked and skimmed ten of these NYTimes articles in the last 17 days, which doesn't seem too unlikely given that they show up on HN fairly often. If you're going to go all high-and-mighty about this, maybe we should be putting a [paywall] link on the HN frontpage so I can avoid clicking these articles altogether.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
  This would be ideal. I hate running into pay walls as well.
- untog 14y ago
  The NYT paywall actually excludes traffic coming from social sources like Facebook and Twitter. They don't do so for Hacker News, though (and I'm not sure about Reddit). So the general principle supports your use-case, it just isn't fine-tuned for the specific sites you use.
_k 14y ago
I think it could work but you need 2 things: niche content and an audience adding value. I'm not interested in what the NY Times has to say about sports so why would I pay for it, I'm not even remotely interested in 99 % of all of their content. I can't tell you how many times I don't even bother reading articles. All I read is the comments on Hacker News. Not reading the articles saves me time. Reading the comments doesn't save me time but at least I'm getting a lot of value out of it. I looked at GigaOm Pro the other day. Some of the content looks interesting and might be worth paying for. Not all of it, but even so, none of those research reports have responses / comments. The audience isn't adding value. Maybe all the value is in the research reports but I just find that hard to believe.

jkonowitch 14y ago

There's a really pernicious attitude of permissiveness, even encouragement, towards theft and evasion of payment for digital goods in many of pockets of online culture. It is disheartening.

voodoomagicman 14y ago
The idea of theft of 'digital goods' is absurd. Goods are defined as "commodities that are tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as they are produced". Theft is defined as "the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" Access to New York Times articles is not a tangible commodity, and bypassing the paywall in no way deprives the New York Times company of access or of a unit of access to the article.
- uno7 14y ago
  What's being stolen here is revenue. i.e. money. Money is "tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as it is produced." Even if by your definition this isn't stealing, you have to admit that you are in fact circumventing the way NYT is attempting to make money for their hard work. The fact is you are stealing from the people who create the content, those maintain it online, etc. Do you intend to deprive the rightful owner of this money? Probably not, but you are still doing it even if that's not your intention. btw, not trying to single you out, specifically. It's more of a figurative "you"

mmastrac 14y ago

I'd have no problem paying for it if it was a significant part of my life. I generally just skim the majority of the non-technical articles on HN, not paying attention to who the provider is. Apparently I've clicked and skimmed ten of these NYTimes articles in the last 17 days, which doesn't seem too unlikely given that they show up on HN fairly often. If you're going to go all high-and-mighty about this, maybe we should be putting a [paywall] link on the HN frontpage so I can avoid clicking these articles altogether.

hayksaakian 14y ago
This would be ideal. I hate running into pay walls as well.
untog 14y ago
The NYT paywall actually excludes traffic coming from social sources like Facebook and Twitter. They don't do so for Hacker News, though (and I'm not sure about Reddit). So the general principle supports your use-case, it just isn't fine-tuned for the specific sites you use.

_k 14y ago

I think it could work but you need 2 things: niche content and an audience adding value. I'm not interested in what the NY Times has to say about sports so why would I pay for it, I'm not even remotely interested in 99 % of all of their content. I can't tell you how many times I don't even bother reading articles. All I read is the comments on Hacker News. Not reading the articles saves me time. Reading the comments doesn't save me time but at least I'm getting a lot of value out of it. I looked at GigaOm Pro the other day. Some of the content looks interesting and might be worth paying for. Not all of it, but even so, none of those research reports have responses / comments. The audience isn't adding value. Maybe all the value is in the research reports but I just find that hard to believe.