
Ask HN: Why is linking to paywalled articles so common here? - whamlastxmas
You rarely or never see this on reddit or pretty much any other community board. Why does it happen so often here when anyone submitting can easily find a non-paywalled source with the same information?
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tomhoward
The HN convention is that paywalled sites are fine as long as there's a way to
bypass the paywall - usually by browsing to it via Google, which is easily
accessible from the "Web" link below the title in the post's comments page.

Posts to pages behind impenetrable paywalls get flagged into oblivion.

 _Why does it happen so often here when anyone submitting can easily find a
non-paywalled source with the same information?_

Because this usually isn't the case at all. Quality of sources varies
considerably, and HN always wants the best one.

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paulddraper
People complain about ads.

And they complain about paywalls.

And they complain about subpar journalism.

\---

HN may just have a different proportion of complaints.

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chollida1
Well I'd argue you do see it on reddit. But its on sub reddits that often have
more discussion than say /r/pics. /r/Science and /r/AdvancedFitness are the
two subreddits i'm thinking of here.

As to why you see it here, it probably has to do with the topics that this
site likes. Business, for better or worse, gets a fair bit of air time here.
That's one area that has typically charged for access to its news/research.

Secondly, I'd argue that there is an element of "you get what you pay for". I
pay alot more than the average person for access to news, and I strongly
believe that this is true.

Thirdly, many of us make our living by having others directly pay for what we
produce. This can make you a bit more sympathetic to the idea of paying for
the work of others.

~~~
bmer
> Secondly, I'd argue that there is an element of "you get what you pay for".
> I pay alot more than the average person for access to news, and I strongly
> believe that this is true.

"You get what you pay for" is mostly a marketing effect, not an actual
phenomenon.

~~~
afarrell
There are many cases where it is an effect of "what you want requires skilled
time. Someone must pay for that".

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afarrell
tl;dr journalists can't pay the bills with exposure.

Because this forum values well-thought-out articles. These articles generally
require a lot of time to compose. If the authors' don't have some other job,
then they have to be paid for their time. In order for the company to acquire
the money to pay, they need to collect money from: 1) advertisements, which
for general-audience text media, aren't that valuable.

2) subscriptions, which few people will pay for if they can get the content
for free.

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calbear81
Sometimes the same information can be much better expressed or presented by
high quality sources that are often paywalled (NYTimes, WSJ, etc.) I don't
doubt that the HN audience probably has more disposable income than the
general internet but it's more likely that our reading habits tend to lean
towards these paywalled sources.

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angry-hacker
Because a lot of people here are wealthier than average and in general prefer
paywalls to ads.

Too bad it often 'breaks' the internet as we know.

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ljsocal
while it's probably well known among HN's cognoscenti, the wsj.com paywall is
easily breached by copying the title of the article then paste into Google
search. Same with barrons.com (less often linked, however) Other paywalls,
I've noticed, give a free pass to mobile browsers.

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bmer
I often benefit from reading the discussion generated by a paywalled article,
rather than reading the article itself. So, I don't mind seeing paywalled
articles posted. Do others feel similarly?

Also see this comment by ljsocal in this thread.

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mankash666
Probably a co-incidence. It's plausible that an entrepreneurial-ly bent
individual pays for WSJ, Barrons, NYTimes etc. Just like teens use snapchat
more than others, certain pay-walled content is more popular with the HN
audience.

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wingerlang
Maybe the content with paywalls overlap with interests of some HN users? I
haven't seen any paywalls at all (to my recollection) so maybe it's business
and political topics.

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bbcbasic
Maybe HN should do deal with WSJ etc. to show HN users just the paywalled
articles that get on the front page of HN. You then take out a single
(cheaper) HN subscription that gets you over the paywall on all the major
sites.

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matt4077
Because actual sources of good journalism have almost all moved to paywalls of
different kinds – from the metered model of The New Yorker to more rigorous
implementations like the WSJ.

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draw_down
Hmm?

