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Is the site behind paywall? I don't want to register just to read one article.
by Achshar 13y ago
Is the site behind paywall? I don't want to register just to read one article.
- chm 13y agowww.bugmenot.com
- hga 13y agoLast time I checked it's a staged paywall. You get X articles for free without any action, X+Y articles if you register, there may be another "free" stage, and of course you can start paying and that may have more than one level. They compete with The Wall Street Journal, which is famously about the only paper that made a success of on-line subscriptions a long time ago.
- dm2 13y agoI closed the popup and the article still didn't appear, so I closed the tab and found something else to read.
- carbocation 13y agoFT apparently requires you to register to see your 8 free articles every 30 days. So you have to do something, not just nothing. Any other sources on this story? The fact that the US spends $80 billion (overall?) on signals intelligence would not be particularly surprising.
- hga 13y agoI guess they've changed their policy and I didn't notice because I registered a long time ago. Not a good idea, there should be no friction until you've tasted a bit of the fruit they're offering. Then again, such mechanisms tend to make it too easy to entirely circumvent the subscription system.
- corresation 13y agoIt is and shouldn't be on HN. There is a recurring argument that these sorts of paywalls are okay for submissions because you can run various circumvention techniques that remove them. Aside from the serious legal grey area there (it may fall under the realm of "hacking"), it is in effect stealing for those of us who abide by intellectual property rights. Sites that implement paywalls understand that they eschew social news sites as a consequence. Abide by that understanding.
- hga 13y agoA counterargument is that they have a registration wall that allows you to read a certain number of articles per month (currently 8 according to carbocation in another subthread of this thread). I find their content to be of sufficiently high quality I had no qualms about doing that some time ago.
- corresation 13y agoPerhaps, though as a general rule HN bars any content that sits behind a login/registration, whether it's Facebook, Quora, etc.
- hga 13y agoIt's not a written rule, at least not in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I do agree it's a good guideline, then again the above says if such an article is the original source, it should be directly linked to....