
Ask HN: Consider banning paywalled articles like those from wsj.com please - NicoJuicy
I can&#x27;t read the paywalled articles on wsj.com anymore. So it&#x27;s breaking my web experience of reading HN.<p>The first post on the page is mostly a TLDR or a link to an alternative article instead of a real comment. For example the current #1 post : Samsung to Permanently Discontinue Galaxy Note 7 Smartphone (wsj.com) - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gyazo.com&#x2F;440858bfcc2f94d912a087ca2ef7ce26<p>There will always be a discussion about paywalled articles and or alternative sources, which takes the discussion away from the topic and there is a high chance that this will be a top comment ( because of upvotes).<p>The current #1 link and #7 link are currently unusable to me : https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gyazo.com&#x2F;578b105ce67f9b6d14cefe0dfeb43efb<p>The trick with bypassing it through the web doesn&#x27;t work for me anymore ( and multiple others). This was good in the past, but not anymore.<p>An alternative like automaticly hiding articles from wsj.com would be nice, but i think it&#x27;s more effectively to just ban the domain? Because it has no use for many HN-readers.<p>Suggested alternative: Add (paywall) automaticly to the link<p>Please discuss or give your opinion?
======
tptacek
This is one of the oldest arguments on Hacker News.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

Note that "incognito window" is one of the "standard workarounds" 'dang
mentions in that thread.

~~~
amyjess
That works for other paywalls but not WSJ (or at least, not consistently:
sometimes it works, but it usually doesn't).

~~~
tptacek
It works reliably for me. Incognito, click the "web" link on the HN byline to
generate the Google search. WSJ checks for cookies _and_ referer.

------
andyjohnson0
I'd like to see linking to paywalled sites discouraged, but banning them might
be too inflexible. Perhaps a change to the submission form that suggests that
the submitter looks for alternative sources first, and appends "(paywalled)"
to the title if they opt to proceed.

Paywalled mass-media articles (e.g. WSJ) are very rarely worth submitting.
Articles in paywalled journals (e.g. Nature) where the abstract is accessible
may well be worth it. But it comes down to judgement.

Finally, I agree that (for the type of topics that HN concerns itself with)
free access to information should be encouraged.

~~~
grahamel
I agree.

The BBC do a similar thing with their football news roundup from the daily
papers with "<short overview> <paper name> \- subscription required"

This doesn't stop people who do subscribe to the site from reading the content
linked to and gives a heads up for people who don't.

The Samsung story isn't exclusive to the WSJ and there are plenty of other
free to access news sites that would have been better for the submission. If
we ban paywalled sites entirely it would prevent submissions of exclusive
content (which could be an interview or journal)

------
danso
I disagree with banning sites that have leaky paywalls. Sites that do good
journalism deserve the pageviews. We shouldn't incentivize blogspam just
because it's convenient. In the case of the WSJ, they were the outlet that did
the investigative work that broke Theranos, among many other stories.

The question boils down to whether the paywall is leaky enough. The "web"
option, which helps the user find the article via Google because the WSJ
paywall let's through the Google-referer, still works for me and many others,
but apparently, not for other users. That's a strange technical quirk. I've
tried emulating it on desktop vs. mobile, and using a VPN for different parts
of the world, and the Google-referer-workaround still works fine for me.

So why can't some users get it to work? Could they be using a plugin that
blocks the referer? Is the use of such a plugin enough of a common-case to
block good journalism for the rest of the users on HN?

~~~
stillsut
About 6 months ago, I reproduced this problem, cleared my cookies, and then it
worked. Although I've never been able to reproduce the problem after that.

------
tzs
> I can't read the paywalled articles on wsj.com anymore. So it's breaking my
> web experience of reading HN.

If a group of people at a party were talking about a book you had not read or
a movie you had not seen, would that be breaking your party experience?

Of course not. You'd go converse with a different group that was talking about
some other book or movie, or talking about sports or something.

You can do the same thing here. You have 30 submissions on the front page
alone to choose from, and even more if you can bring yourself to hit the
"more" link at the bottom of the page.

And unlike the book/movie discussion at a party, if you do go into the
comments on an article you have not read you are unlikely to get any spoilers
that will ruin it for you if you do later find the article somewhere you can
read.

> An alternative like automaticly hiding articles from wsj.com would be nice,
> but i think it's more effectively to just ban the domain? Because it has no
> use for many HN-readers.

Every highly technical article discussed on HN is of no use to many HN
readers. Do you think we should ban those, too?

Also, the utility of HN submissions is usually in the comments, not the
article itself. The comments are usually quite useful even without reading the
article. The article is merely a launching point.

~~~
tsukikage
> If a group of people at a party were talking about a book > you had not read
> or a movie you had not seen, would that be > breaking your party experience?

Not really, but, while snappy, that's not really a good depiction of what's
happening here.

A better analogy might be groups of people at a large exhibition discussing
what's happening in the various booths. You're welcomed to go look in the
relevant booth then join the discussion. Most of the booths you can just
wander up to and take a look inside, but sometimes you walk over and poke your
head in and the booth bouncer looks at your visitor badge, slaps you in the
face to attract your attention and demands you fill out a bunch of forms and
pay them before they'll let you in.

The wasted walk and the slap in the face kinda ruin your experience, so you
ask if people discussing the slapping sort of booths might maybe warn people
first, but they suggest you just put up with the slaps and move on if you
don't want to pay up front for everything.

How does that make you feel?

------
oneeyedpigeon
I agree with the proposal to ban paywalled sites. Workarounds are annoying
and/or temporary. HN should be about open discussion of freely available
content; we shouldn't be encouraging the ghetto-ification of the web. The
typical paywalled sites are almost never the only (or even the best) source of
an article.

~~~
drinchev
So having this mentality, HN should also ban any links to non-free books (
e.g. amazon ), links to apps and any other websites that offer a paid service
/ content, which you have to consume in order to be an active participant in
the conversation, happening in the comments.

I don't agree with this position.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
TBH, I don't see how a link to a book page on amazon would result in a
productive discussion on HN - is there a precedent? I wouldn't ban
apps/websites that _offer_ a paid service, only those that _require_ one. And
I'm willing to row back _slightly_ from an outright ban, as I've said in other
comments.

------
epberry
I don't think these sights should be banned. WSJ and NYT in particular produce
excellent journalism and the digital subscriptions are actually quite cheap,
even if you're on a budget. If anything we should ban tabloids like Business
Insider which mostly produce summaries of other sights and listicles.

------
anilgulecha
I propose that paywalled article be allowed, but as soon as a comment
recommends a non-paywalled article for the same story, we switch to that.

HN already replaces article URLs with better ones, so the above will work
through the old process with an additional parameter for what's considered
"better" for HN.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I like the idea in theory, but in practise it always takes some time till the
link gets replaced and it's manual labor for HN.

I don't think it's something i as a developer would want to see as a solution
( just my 2 cents)

------
darklajid
And ban quora while you're at it? Ah, wishful thinking of course.

I do agree that inaccessible sites are of little value for discussions and
would gladly have a visual indicator of these sites to avoid the click, close,
flag response.

~~~
happyslobro
Protip: setting your user agent to GoogleBot eliminates a lot of bullshit like
this. Most sites, including Quora, won't hold out on GoogleBot, although the
WSJ does. I guess they don't care if 90% of their article doesn't get indexed,
that's pretty brave.

There is a plugin for Chrome that makes that easy:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-
switche...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-
for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg)

------
tsukikage
Slap (paywall) into the article title. Then people who find it a problem know
to skip it.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
The trouble is, that's locking a set of people out of the debate entirely,
which is surely not what we want to encourage. Much better to have an
alternative, freely-accessible article from a different source.

~~~
danso
Why is it so much better to encourage blogspam? Which is what you'll get when
the topic is of worthwhile substance, such that there is no real alternative
besides an aggregator?

Why shouldn't the burden be on the reader to jump into incognito (i.e. non-
plugin) mode to read an article? Virtually everyone on HN has the technical
chops to switch between an incognito browser instance and whatever they're
using to read HN.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
I block marketing domains in my daily-updated /etc/hosts file. This is a much
more performant and much safer way to block malware and adware than using a
browser plugin. Yet, your suggestion to just shut off your plugin helps me
none.

~~~
danso
Er, what help do you need? If you aren't using a plugin, then visiting the
paywall article via Google should work for you as etc/hosts does not affect
the referer attribute

------
NicoJuicy
Screenshots of the comments of the current #1 HN post of a wsj article:
[https://gyazo.com/440858bfcc2f94d912a087ca2ef7ce26](https://gyazo.com/440858bfcc2f94d912a087ca2ef7ce26)
. Which takes the discussion away from the topic and will always be related to
paywalled articles or alternative sources.

------
geuis
I support this proposal. I support any independent company's right to perform
their business how they want. I also support that popular sites that encourage
open dialog and discussion should not include companies that disallow public
viewing of their content.

Let's also extend this to companies that prevent those with content blockers
from viewing their pages. Forbes is one, and techcrunch is another. Techcrunch
doesn't block content, but their site UI is messed up enough that when content
blockers are used that it makes their site unusable.

~~~
Klibarchu
Techcrunch looks great in Reader mode.

------
amyjess
The current policy is that articles from sites with easily-bypassable paywalls
are allowed.

The WSJ paywall is not easily bypassable. The usual techniques to bypass
paywalls are inconsistent with WSJ. Sometimes opening the 'web' link in an
incognito window works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, there's no
way to get to the article.

The WSJ paywall should _not_ be treated like the NYT paywall. It's a different
animal, and it shouldn't be allowed here because it fails the easily-
bypassable test.

------
Terribledactyl
I don't know if "banning" is quite right, sometimes the article only exists
behind such a structure, but may be worthwhile for the community to discuss.
Mods already replace higher quality links after they show up in the
discussion. The same could happen by submitting a prominent paywalled source
to get the discussion rolling, and then as a better source is made or
discovered switch over to it.

And the comments on HN seem to be more coupled to an event than any given
particular article, meta-metadiscussion aside.

------
aikah
If nobody can read the content of a link then no discussion can take place on
HN therefore it shouldn't be on HN. I say ban paywalled articles and stop
generating free traffic for these websites that don't want to share
information at first place.

------
amelius
I'd like to see more summaries on HN. I'm often reading HN on my phone, and
the connection is often too slow to read the actual article.

A summary will also help with paywalled articles.

~~~
cooper12
I think a submitter of paywalled content should make sure a summary/excerpt
exists on the site linked, or they should include one themselves. Sounds like
a fair compromise between not being able to link and not being able to read,
while still stimulating some discussion.

------
codingdave
Banning seems extreme. We have mechanisms on HN to self-moderate -- If you do
not like paywalled articles, do not upvote them or post them. But as long as
other people are posting and upvoting, it means some part of this community
feels they have value.

So this discussion is great - lets make sure everyone takes the time to give
it thought. But after those thoughts have had time to percolate, the actions
of the community will self-correct. Or not.

------
bryanlarsen
Does the web link work from an incognito session? I suspect that WSJ just sets
a cookie on first visit to show the paywall on subsequent visits.

I personally agree with the current HN paywall policy. If the Google
workaround doesn't work, then WSJ will get banned from Google, which is a far
harsher penalty than getting banned from HN.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
It's probably the best workaround that we have right now. The trouble is, it's
an additional cognitive load to determine for each and every link whether it's
one that requires incognito mode. If there's a good browser plugin that
supports automatically opening links from listed domains in a new incognito
window, that would probably be better than the current 'refer via google'
workaround.

------
NicoJuicy
I don't think they want us to have this discussion :) -
[http://imgur.com/a/GdMkz](http://imgur.com/a/GdMkz)

According to me, this should be a top discussion. But the ranking algorithm
seems to be way off, like we have been punished in the algorithm.

Any thoughts what this could be?

~~~
sctb
This post was subjected to several ranking penalties, not least of which were
user flags and the flamewar software. Many meta-discussions end up this way
because they were off-topic for HN by virtue of not being intellectually
interesting, which is why we're here.

The paywall issue in particular has received plenty of discussion already:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989).

~~~
NicoJuicy
Never ever saw that article, thanks

------
chandru89new
On many subreddits, paywalled articles are prefixed "[Paywall]". I think
that's a better option than banning it altogether.

------
wglb
Another solution is to search for the words in the headline. This works for me
even in a non-incognito window. Very little effort required.

------
dx034
I agree, most WSJ articles are available on other news pages and the web
workaround doesn't work for me either (since a few days).

------
retox
How about a host filter in the user options? At least that way people with a
subscription can see the link.

------
thisisit
While we talk about how free apps are killing the market and making life
difficult for an indie developer, we want to make it difficult for WSJ
reporters too? If the story is broken or first reported by WSJ, example the
suspicious cases one, by all means they should be the ones linked. At least
that way people are aware of the good work WSJ is doing and maybe pay for the
news.

------
asdffderty
No, it's a bad idea. Pay for good content.

------
DanBC
For WSJ: Open the web link in an incognito window; click the search result.
Does that not work?

