Ask HN: Why is linking to paywalled articles so common here?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People complain about ads.

And they complain about paywalls.

And they complain about subpar journalism.

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HN may just have a different proportion of complaints.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hmm?