HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News

82 points by smithmayowa ↗ HN
You see an interesting article headline with a lot of upvotes on the front page, and you proceed to click on it only to be greeted with a pay wall on getting to the web address, why are these sort of articles allowed to get to the front page in the first place?

35 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 93.4 ms ] thread
karma20
HN's policy on paywalls is outlined in the FAQ [1]. Private Browsing mode is generally a good workaround:

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

The rationale explained by dang in a 2015 post [2] makes sense:

> Publications like NYT, WSJ, the Economist, and the New Yorker have paywalls that leave ways for readers to work around them. Such stories are OK to post to Hacker News. Yes, this sucks, but the loss of many substantive articles would suck worse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938

arcboii92
Aside from: clearing cookies, having to reopen news articles you've already half read in incognito, or adding an additional '.' (like "nytimes.com./blah"); what are some of the other ways people are getting around paywalls?
n4r9
Adding "outline.com/" before the url sometimes works.
lowdose
At least wsj.com does not work anymore on outline. Maybe HN can bundle all those paywalled sites and sell a subscription.
sturgill
Use a WSJ link from Bitly into Outline and it works again...
allthing
I have this trick where I just pay for high quality, well researched news because I'm an adult and I realize that not everything should be free and maybe we should pay for some things.

People on HN like to complain about paying in data to use Google and Facebook and yet also consider it an affront that they have to pay money to journalists.

krageon
Which one do you pay for? All of them? How do you determine high quality? How do you reconcile the fact that you need to pay before you can read it, thus not being able to evaluate the quality properly? How do you reconcile saying a large news publication produces quality with the amount of errors that are frequently and egregiously present in articles with any sort of depth?
tofflos
I agree with the opening question but I find latter part of the argument unreasonable. You will encounter many, many services in life that require an initial payment. Pay once and then decide whether you want to keep on paying for more. This applies to restaurants, movies, hotels, taxis, etc. The initial payment for pay-walled articles is usually quite small. If you don't know where to start you can always ask a friend, read a review, or join an online community.
krageon
I opened and closed with the questions what were to me most relevant, which is my mistake as I should have front-loaded both. Your answer is reasonable, except it glosses over the fact that the quality is bad and this is a pervasive issue.
Xelbair
True, i would agree.

If only paying for high quality news and articles guaranteed me that i won't see ads, well at least non-js ads.

Sadly that won't happen because people who can pay for such news have higher disposable income and are better target for advertisers.

deftnerd
Personally, I do just clear cookies, but I've found a good Firefox extension that does it well for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-cookie...

It has a convenient button that clears all the storage for the page in the current window. It remove the cookies, local storage and session storage. Then I just reload the pay-walled page and it thinks I'm a new visitor.

tehlike
Outline or archive.is are other ways to read these articles.
kjaftaedi
Because the audience here understands how to work around paywalls.

There's even a "web" link at the top of every article to help you, as having google as a referrer is one of many workarounds. Others include, incognito windows, multiple browsers or clearing your cookies, google cache, outline.com, archive.is, etc.

If there's an article that's been posted here, and it's being upvoted, you can be sure that people are reading it.

If you've tried everything you can think of, but still can't get to the content, just ask. Someone will likely assist you.

jdsully
The pay articles are often more timely and higher quality than the free news outlets. It seems only natural they’d get linked to from an aggregator geared to high quality discussion.
johnsimer
one technique I rarely see mentioned is disabling javascript. Will get you around NYT paywall and others

But what I find ironic is HN as a whole seems to complain about both paywalls and ads. . . You have to pick one or the other

Perhaps it's two separate groups of people complaining though

mattmurdog
This is what I do. But there are a few where they don't use a cover and require you to actually subscribe before loading the real page.
jdmcnugent
If I hit a paywall on safari iOS I simply click "send to" button and open it in the Duck Duck Go app.
quickthrower2
I think HN takes a pragmatic approach. There is quality news on those paywalled sites. They are paywalled because they need to pay professionals to write quality researched content (it isn’t some internet marketer trying to make a quick buck) so ethically it seems OK and there are workarounds.

I think there would be a natural balance in that a paywalled article needs to be even better than average to do well as fewer people can read it to upvote it. So hopefully when a paywalled article appears it’s better than average.

Medium.com is my only concern because they paywall run of the mill blog quality articles. I’d encourage people to post using a friends link in that case if they can get it.

jpindar
Why shouldn't they be? Do you have difficulty reading them, or do you some sort of philosophical objection?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
m-p-3
I don't want to completely deny them because some a genuinely interesting, but if there was a way to tag them accordingly (a paywall symbol, etc), I wouldn't be as annoyed when I go face-first into the wall without any warnings.
pedalpete
That's a good idea, and it gives the user the suggestion to perhaps open in incognito/private browser mode to view.
smittywerben
You're supposed to post the original source. Have you tried using a filter?
zaro
Because HN is not place for poor people!

Just joking[0], it's mostly because a lot of these pay walled sites have a workaround for reading the article anyway.

[0] I am pretty sure I'll be downvoted for it, because it actually is mostly true.

not_a_cop75
Well it's not a lie. Most paywalls you can access via anonymous access or disguised as a search engine or spider. Don't ask me about the legalities of such behavior, however. I'm waiting for some content license authority to start charging 10k per instance of paywall evasion.
cryptozeus
Because many people have paid subscription and sometimes its even covered by employers account.
pndy
Slightly off-topic: I'm having a feeling that in last months HN is getting flooded with links coming from big general news, newspapers portals like there's some kind of content "promotion" going on. Or maybe it's just me?
protonimitate
nytimes articles have been exceptionally prevalent lately. I'm not anti-nytimes, but a lot of them are very far off topic for "hacker news".
buboard
At which point will people start considering paywalls ads (which is what they are)? Siloed content should not enjoy the momentum of "previously unsiloed", and it's no different from content that has forever been siloed. They are functionally not much different from content marketing blogs.