
Ask HN: Should Paywalled Articles Be Penalized? - droffel
Hackernews is basically the front page of my internet. I view the front page multiple times a day, and enjoy reading the myriad interests of the community. Lately though, I&#x27;ve noticed my experience taking a turn for the worse - repeated articles with paywalls hastily slapped in front of them.<p>Perhaps I just have a fond view of the past, but paywalls didn&#x27;t seem nearly as prevalent a year ago, and it seems like this problem is only going to get worse before it gets better (if it gets better at all).<p>I doubt this will get much traction, but I want to open up a discussion as to potential approaches HN can take to remedy this situation. Should paywalled articles be flagged visibly as such from the front page (so I know not to bother)? Should they be disallowed entirely? Is this just a made up problem, and I&#x27;m just yelling into the wind? I&#x27;m not sure.
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dang
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the
thread. Please see:

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

and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

and
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

Paywalls suck and are annoying, but HN would be worse without WSJ, NYT, the
New Yorker, the Economist, and so on. Hopefully someone will eventually fix
publishing on the web, and then we won't have either the paywall problem or
the paywall complaint problem.

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newscracker
Usually some kind person posts an Outline link or an Archive link to the full
article in the discussions. But I’ve also seen those get buried in the
discussions about the article. My problem with paywalls is that even if you
pay, most of them [1] still thrust trackers (including third party ones) and
scripts on you. I find that to be evil. So I refuse to play that game with
them and stay away.

To your point, what I’d like to see is a non-paywalled link, whenever shared
by someone in the discussions, “pinned to the top” without any votes for it
(or assigned a fixed number of votes). Considering that the default interface
of HN is all about minuscule fonts that most people won’t even notice, the
“web” option is not discoverable by everyone (and seriously, what does “web”
even mean when you’re already on the web?). Hence a pinned comment with the
same font and size as the rest of the comments, but with an indicator showing
it’s pinned.

[1]: As an exception, Ars Technica is the only bigger site I know where a paid
subscription means you don’t get any ads or trackers.

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desdiv
>Usually some kind person posts an Outline link or an Archive link to the full
article in the discussions.

OP is probably asking because recent changes broke all the common workarounds
for some major sites:

1\. HN's built-in "web" button (basically a Google redirect)

2\. outline.com

3\. archive.org

Currently all three workarounds are broken for New York Times and the Wall
Street Journal, among others.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
They seem receptive to an _entirely clean_ incognito browser. If you haven't
cleared cookies and history etc or relaunched the usual workarounds fail.
There's a few addons that will automate.

Turning off JS works for 9 out of 10 paywalls. There's a selection of addons
that let you turn on or off JS on a per site basis.

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smileysteve
No, if anything they should be prioritized (though perhaps below ShowHn,
AskHn, and notable bloggers.

Where hacker news aggregates articles interesting to the technology community,
many of the best researched articles are going to be from outfits that are
selling articles instead of a captive audience.

Given the ire of digital advertising, invasive targeting, Amazon fake reviews,
Facebook uninstalls, and Google avoidance; it seems that paying publishers for
articles would be the top course of action to avoid bias, idea pollution,
clickbait, etc.

The next similar source of topical information that's not tracking, only
selling viewers as consumers, and has any viability is volunteers posting
personal non-monetized blogs... Which would lack funding or efforts to
journalistically research. That is at least absent state media companies like
the BBC.

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anfilt
Like digital advertising sucks becuase tracking and privacy implcations. I
dont think that is a good reason alone to promote pay walled articles. Alot of
these sites even if you pay track users. So no dang differnce, but now a lot
people cant read the article.

~~~
smileysteve
/s/can't/choose not to

While I suspect the average hacker news commenter can afford the discretionary
income to subscribe to the nytimes and Washington Post, I also suspect most
have access to the publications at their local public library, if not more
locally at their place of business, or other places with news publications
available.

As a "news aggregator site" , I suspect there is some quality increase if the
community has enough interest in news to put some of these minimal efforts
forward.

The quantity of nytimes articles posted and the popularity of those from votes
to comments to thorough discussion indicates that a significant portion of the
community derives value from these paid sources.

To be contrary, the times gets many more posts than the BBC, nih, and posts
from other available free sources (Berkely, Stanford, MIT student papers or
research) seem much more rare.

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t-h-e-chief
I wouldn't say penalised. They should very likely need to be titled
appropriately though. ie.

Paywall: <some shitty NY Times article>

That said, some other articles should highlight that they are paid for by
think tanks or whatever other shitty agenda agency is behind them.

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haihaibye
How about labeling them?

Eg for old links we have (2016), we could have eg: (2016, paywalled)

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MoronInAHurry
I hate this pervasive attitude that paywalls are some sort of annoyance that
sites just "hastily slap on" for no reason. They do it because the
subscription is _how they make money, so that they can pay people to write all
those articles that you want to read_.

Thousands of us pay for the subscriptions that enabled those articles to be
written, while others complain about how annoying it is that they can't read
them too. If you find that there are a lot of articles from a site you want to
read but can't because of the paywall, that should be a hint that it's
probably worth paying for.

Most of the major sites' subscriptions are very affordable, and they can only
continue producing that content because some of us are willing to pay for it.
Paywalls seem more common now because the old model of giving everything away
for free _doesn 't work_.

~~~
prepend
The problem I have with paywalls is that I will not subscribe to a random
site. Ever. It’s not realistic for me to subscribe to the Times, WSJ, plus all
the others. I subscribe to what I subscribe to.

Companies with paywalls will fail. They are failing slowly. The Times is
perhaps most successful, but they are still spiraling downwards.

I think smarter companies will be ad supported or Patreon or some other
business model that will work.

I don’t begrudge bad companies for trying to hang onto their models. But
what’s annoying is when I forget about a paywall and click through to be
annoyed.

I would like a feature in HN to filter out those articles because I can’t read
them. Circumventing their blocks is possible, but annoying.

~~~
eganist
If the company produces content that the rest of HN feels is quality
content... maybe you should subscribe if you're interested in consuming the
content?

You don't have to, but it's either that or perpetuate ad networks that spread
malware.

~~~
prepend
I’m not interested enough to subscribe. It’s cool that others find it valuable
enough to subscribe.

But I think there are fewer and fewer willing each year, so they’ll die out.

It reminds me of the record companies in 2000 who talked about value and
whatnot while they all died off. It’s cool that people liked paying, but the
writing was on the wall.

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CommieBobDole
I think one of the problems is that "paywalled" isn't always a binary thing; I
can't count the number of times I've visited a link from HN and read an
article, then gone to the comments to see people complaining about the
paywall. And vice-versa - sometimes I find a paywalled article that none of
the regular tricks seems to work for, but everybody's in the comments quoting
and talking about the article. So it might not be as easy as just banning or
labeling paywalled articles.

That said, it should probably be against the site guidelines to submit hard-
paywalled articles; if the vast majority of the site's users can't read it,
what's the point?

~~~
smacktoward
_> if the vast majority of the site's users can't read it, what's the point?_

Lots of articles from a particular paywalled publication getting submitted and
upvoted could be taken as a useful signal that it's a publication worth paying
for.

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eganist
That's what the web link intends to solve.

It's not intuitive, and it's pretty kludgey, but it works. Click it on the
next e.g. WSJ article that pops up and then pick the WSJ article from within
Google's results - et voila, (likely) no paywall.

And the other sites... eh, if it's that valuable, someone will probably dump
it.

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ddtaylor
I do actively avoid links to paywall services and it can be a bummer to see
multiple of them on the front page.

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opportune
Completely agree, it’s decreasing my engagement because to me those articles
are just noise.

I had an idea, perhaps HN could wrap content in outbound links (ie trackable)
and disallow commenting/voting on content for users who haven’t followed the
outbound link? I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the voting is done
based solely on headlines (and this is often reflected in the comments
addressing the headline much more than the article - not that I’m completely
innocent of that myself). People would probably be less likely to upvote
something if they got paywalled

