Ask HN: Should HN have a toggle to show/hide paywall articles? - jeremyperson
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joshstrange
I think the logistics of this are too onerous for a site like HN. Even Reddit
doesn't have anything like this. Between search engines/crawlers getting a
different page than normal visitors, X free articles a month, and per-articles
paywalls (such as sites that have removed the paywall for all COVID-19-related
content) I think there is no easy way to tell if a site has paywall or not.

You could probably create a list of sites that have a paywall anywhere but I'm
not sure if that would really provide a huge benefit.

For me, if a site has a paywall and I'm not willing to pay for it then I'll
often read the comments to determine if I want to consider paying for it
(normally only after I run into the same wall multiple times) or if I want to
go looking on the internet for other reporting on the topic.

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trboyden
Taken to another level, why is HN showing articles from news sites at all,
when it's own guidelines say if media would cover it, it's probably off topic?

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greenyoda
> when it's own guidelines say if media would cover it

Actually, the guidelines say: "If they'd cover it on _TV news_ , it's probably
off-topic". And also: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
is OK.[1]

Long-form articles on news sites usually have much more intellectual content
than TV news.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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rat_melter
Yes.

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jppope
Yes HN should hide all the paywall articles. It wouldn't be that hard to do
since most of them are NYtimes, WashPost, Medium, etc.

Hell, I'll help build the feature its that much of a nuisance...

