12 ms·

Apologies about the link to a restricted site. I didn't notice it since I landed on the article via a search. Out of curiosity, since several comments here com

• zokier 12y ago
  I think paywalls are reasonable good way (from consumer point of view) to bring in money, although I realize that it probably would mean scaling down for many major publications. The LWN model might be the ideal balance point; recent items are subscriber-only, older stuff is free. That should work even better for WSJ style publication where I'd assume most people are more interested in breaking news rather than week old stuff. I can understand where the anti-paywall sentiment stems from. We have been conditioned for over an decade to get free news from web. Meanwhile piratism has become mainstream and anti-copyright movement has grown, both which have changed peoples ways of thinking about value of information etc. Some might also think paywalls to be exploitative bait-and-switch tactic, which admittedly might be true in some cases. Of course there is stark difference between supporting paywalls as a concept, and supporting posting links to paywalled content to places like HN (or reddit or /. etc), because you are kinda doing some "viral" marketing for the publication and dividing the community to those who subscribe and those who do not. That will inherently limit the communitys ability to discuss the content.
  • bentcorner 12y ago
    Complete aside, but I just did a google search for "site:news.ycombinator.com lwn.net" and filtered to "this past week" to make a comment similar to yours, and Google found your comment, which is 24 minutes old right now. I'm pretty jaded with internet search, but frankly I'm astounded (Although I might have just gotten lucky with the spider).
• musername 12y ago
  write an article about it. and please don't call online news vendors the papers
  • freehunter 12y ago
    WSJ and NYT are the papers even if you're reading them online, because they literally are newspapers in real life.
• snomad 12y ago
  > how do you think newspapers should monetize? Idea I had is to flip the model. Newspapers pay readers, who for payment agree to see ads tailored to their interests. Users are given short quizzes after article to prove they actually read. Fail, and they don't get paid.
  • xienze 12y ago
    I can't imagine how that could fail!
• jordigh 12y ago
  > Out of curiosity, since several comments here complained about the paywall ("paywalls are nsfl"), and an equal number or more on HN run adblockers and/or openly dislike ads in general (the whole "you are the product" meme), how do you think newspapers should monetize? I adblock aggressively, and I don't think it's my capitalist duty to watch ads for products in order to create wants for products I don't need.[1] I'm very bothered by the idea of being "nice" to a site by watching ads. I don't want to help a site by watching ads; that's supposed to help a third party by creating a need in me to buy something, not the website I actually care about. I much prefer cut-and-dry paywalls or donation buttons. Thus, I'm fine with newspapers having paywalls. If that's what sells, let them paywall everything. It's their prerogative. However, there are also plenty of unpaywalled sources. At the moment, most news can be obtained from the web without paying, and I doubt that this will change. I don't have a solution for the news industry, but guilting me into watching ads will never work. Paywalls for academic journals are an entirely different problem, since in many cases the journal "editors" are in fact rather parisitic and contribute nothing but prestige, while the actual work is done by others and is unpaid. Those paywalls are terrible. But you made something and you don't want me to see it until I pay? That's fine. [1] And I almost never "need" anything. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." If I need something, I'll know it. I don't need ads to tell me what to need. I therefore find the entire premise behind advertising pernicious. Only when I want to buy something, I'll look at ads, so until I actually have a need or want to buy something, don't shove ads down my throat or guilt me into watching them.
  • sbergot 12y ago
    It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer. "But the page is bloated and unusable with ads". Then refuse the contract. Use another service. Inventing your own terms about the cost of something produced by someone else is never ok. "guilting me into watching ads will never work". It is great that you accept your own behavior. That doesn't make it right.
    • jordigh 12y ago
      > It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer. The author has no lordship over my computer or my mailbox. I can toss out junk mail. I can even more easily program my computer to toss out ads. Programmability is a very natural feature of a computer, so why not use it? My home, my computer, my rules. If you make it more difficult for me to remove ads, then yes, I will eventually stop getting anything from you at all. I'm fine with this arms race. If you want to make your ads so obnoxious as to make them very difficult to ignore, then I'm fine with ignoring all of you. I will never be fine with having consumerism forcibly shoved down my throat. As long as I can program my computer to ignore ads, we can enjoy an uneasy armistice. If you give me a donation or subscription button for your website or service, we can both be much happier.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• ThinkBeat 12y ago
  I think there is a distinction to be made here. Paywalls are fine. If you feel that the Wall Street Journal is worth your time and money then feel free to subscribe to it. But paywalls are a double edged sword. If the source requires people to subscribe to read it, then the vast majority of internet users wont have a chance to read it, and learns to avoid the site. When you share a link in public forum and the link requires a subscription to read it, that means most readers wont have a chance to enjoy the content and they feel frustrated. You can usually find an article about the same topic on a public site. The manner the topic is covered, the depth of the article, the quality of the coverage might be different but it will give the general public an idea about what it is all about. As far as ads and ad blockers. Tivo and tivo like devices are pretty common now that you can skip over tv commercials. I think its the same with web based ad blockers. The truth is that the majority of people who use these things would not have had a positive response to the ad in the first place. What does happen, both on tv and on the web, is that product placements in the content itself becomes more and more common.
  • wozniacki 12y ago
    Remember TimesSelect? [1] Search Engine Land has an excellent write-up on the debate so far.[2] There are no clear answers but I for one just hate the notion of a single individual businessman - American or otherwise - owning a sizable interest in America's preeminent newspaper.[3] It isn't healthy to the voice of the publication, in the long run. [1] TimesSelect http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/ http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/lettertoreaders.html http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/lettertoreaders.html [2] The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How “Google Limits” Led To “Search Engine Limits” http://searchengineland.com/leaky-new-york-times-paywall-google-limits-69302 http://searchengineland.com/leaky-new-york-times-paywall-goo... [3] Carlos Slim Becomes Largest Individual New York Times Shareholder http://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-slim-exercises-new-york-times-warrants-1421274205 http://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-slim-exercises-new-york-t...
• debacle 12y ago
  People who use adblock are just entitled. They are manipulating the tragedy of the commons and then absolving themselves of any responsibility. They'll defend their right to use adblock militantly and then go pirate a game using the same defense. It's a personal moral defense rather than a logical justification.
  • angersock 12y ago
    Or, you know, we just don't want to have to deal with bad ads cluttering up our content, or ads that spy on and track us, or ads that start playing sound for no apparent reason, or ads that break our browsers. Yeah, no, on second thought--it's probably that we're actually pirates. That's a much more obvious answer.
    • hsod 12y ago
      This isn't a rebuttal against the tragedy of the commons argument. Commercial fisherman "just don't want to have to deal with" catching less fish, but overfishing is still a problem.
      • angersock 12y ago
        If I put a bowl of M&Ms out on my front lawn, and then complain that nobody else refills it from time to time, is that the tragedy of the commons, or me just being a fool?
        • elinchrome 12y ago
          I would gladly fill your bowl with m and ms.
        • hsod 12y ago
          pretty terrible analogy. there's no point at which you putting M&Ms on your lawn can be self-sustaining. Both professional journalism and fish populations CAN be self-sustaining (from the perspective of individual consumers). Also, even if your analogy did make sense, the end result would be no more M&Ms (aka no more professional journalism). That's the outcome we're trying to avoid.
• dspillett 12y ago
  I don't disagree with paywalls generally, but I don't think paywalled content should be (intentionally) linked as the main subject on HN or similar unless that is the only good source of information about the matter in hand. It stops us masses actually reading what you have posted for us to read. If all the non-paywalled sources are lacking detail, then I'd suggest using one of them for the main link and add a "more detail <here> behind the paywall" comment immediately below. Obnoxious advertising (pop-ups, auto playing audio, ...) is universally bad though and should not be linked to at all if avoidable. I'd prefer a paywalled source to one that uses obnoxious ads/trackers/other.
  • jawns 12y ago
    > I don't think paywalled content should be (intentionally) linked as the main subject on HN or similar unless that is the only good source of information about the matter in hand. I think a fair expectation is that if you're going to post a link to a paywalled site, you should add a brief summary of the article as a comment. (Kind of like a companion to tl;dr, only in this case, it's te;dr, for "too expensive; didn't read.")
    • dspillett 12y ago
      Usually a good paywalled article will at least present an abstract, which should cover the need for a summary. If it is an absolute paywall (pay or read nothing, no abstract/summary for free) then yes the poster should provide a summary so others can decide if they want to gain access to the rest or not.
• a3n 12y ago
  Since I use ddg, I can put this in my addr/search bar: !gn site:wsj.com "RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing" which brings me to this: http://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=site%3Awsj.com%20%22RadioShack%20Prepares%20Bankruptcy%20Filing%22 http://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=site%3Awsj.com%... Perhaps for sites that allow this (NYT and WSJ come to mind), it should become part of HN culture to just post links in the second form (the google news link). Otherwise, I'm sure many people here are capable of creating a bookmarklet that does the above directly from an HN page. I just do the manual op that I described above, it's not that onerous or that often. But I'm rarely reading from a phone either.
  • sage 12y ago
    This bookmarklet seems to work in the few cases I tested: javascript:var as = document.getElementsByTagName("a");searchurl=as[12].protocol +"//"+ as[12].hostname + as[12].pathname;location.href='http://google.com/search?q='+searchurl http://google.com/search?q='+searchurl If you click it from a HN comments page, it will Google the story's url. For NYT and WSJ, clicking on the story from the Google results should get you in without the paywall. I have only tested this in Firefox. If anyone has improvements to the bookmarklet, please post it.
    • a3n 12y ago
      Hey, not bad. I just tried it for a bbc.com story and it showed up on search. Maybe this javascript thing will catch on.