Why do people post paywalled articles? Seriously I’m not subscribing to some bullshit newspaper out of Houston. If they don’t want to let me read it I don’t want to read it. Just. Ignore. Paywalls. We have plenty of open information. Let the closed stuff stagnate and die.
Journalism needs to be paid for. The open information you want is often unreliable, unverified and amateur. Yes, of course you can point to the vlogs of Sabine Hossenfelder, but she won't tell you about the problems with review sites or the tensions in German politics over Ukraine, nor tell you about the James Webb telescope in easy words, nor review the latest Marvel movie. You know who will tell you that for free? Breitbart (). And why? Because someone else pays them to push an agenda. Don't be their enabler.
() Breitbart is just one example. An ugly one, though.
There are thousands of separate paywalls out there, so if the HN front page is full of paywalled links, most of us won’t be able to read any of them. This might make sense if there were a tech wire service we agreed on using.
You have a point. Perhaps there should be a rule that paywalled links can only be submitted with a (user-written) summary? Does take away a bit from the paper's income, though.
Often the papers are doing the same, they're taking the information from a third-party that actually did the journalism.
Yes, there's value in aggregation, which is why tech news sites mostly just use Reddit to harvest stories from a week or so after they appear. IMO that's very low value.
If the "news" sites wanted to encourage reward for sources they could start by attributing every story and indicating who they paid and the originator of the factual data. Truly though most of them would seemingly rather we paid them whilst they just regurgitate a social news site.
The so-called free (as in beer) internet is the root of many problems. One should pay directly for the services/information and not route the money through some surveillance capitalist. Why would the internet be different than any other business? You don't go to the shop and just pick whatever you need because you have paid already elsewhere?
Actually the end stage of communism they were supposed to abandon money. With capitalist greed abandoned, people would just take what they need and nothing more. Looks like lot of the internet works like that now. Except that we are not good socialist factory or farm workers but we have done our share by providing our privacy to the maintainers of "free" internet services.
Edit: Actually I feared the link would not open for me with an EU IP because of GDPR blocker. That's not uncommon for US newspapers. However, it just brought up a huge cookie dialogue and showed the article just fine on agreeing.
