HN and Paywalls
"How should HN deal with the potentially very good, but aggressively paywalled submissions and references?"
More detail:
Publications like WaPo, NYT, Guardian, Financial Times, Medium, Boston Globe, LA Times, Scientific American, GQ, Epicurios, etc, show VERY little of the real content. But many, like me, can't or won't pay their individual ~$5/month to see the $70+/USD total of their combined total to see the actual content? And believe me, I am shortening the list in a big way... everyone wants your $5/month.
It's a real problem, that hurts HN...EVERY single day. We are missing out, globally, on real, well researched opinion.
So, in a nutshell, do we block paywalled content, or figure out an alternative? The wish wash ignoring it is DONE.
Also, calling out @dang. I respect and trust you. Where are you at on this? It's a core and BIG deal to many of us. We want HN to take a definitive STAND and quit sitting on the sidelines.
If this goes nowhere, it's at least a URL I can reference when people ask why I'm so curmudgeony on the subject.
5 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] threadBut a more measured approach is to ensure it is flagged as a paywalled item.
Some paywalls have gotten harder to bypass since then. Personally, I subscribe to the NYT, WaPo, and theinformation.com, some can be read in incognito mode, and I've given up in exasperation with the WSJ and foreignpolicy.com.
I'd love to see a startup do a Spotify-for-news model, where I pay $10/mo and they allocate it to all the news sites proportional to clicks or time spent. Surprisingly, dealing with newspapers is even more impossible than dealing with music labels.
Even worse, are the "delayed" paywalls, where you are allowed to read the first paragraph, and then when you scroll down (thanks to the header and menu + first para taking up an entire screen) you're hit either with a cutoff asking you to subscribe, a full page splash screen telling you to pay $.
I personally think that on a news aggregation site, there needs to at the very least, be a tag or small indicator next to each submission that there is a paywall. Perhaps have two types of tags (differentiated by color?) where "soft" paywall are separated from "hard" paywalls (soft paywalls being ones you can easily get around in incognito or a browser extension etc.)
What you are arguing for, essentially, is for the mere existence of an article to be denied all HN readers unless you are being given free access to all of that article's content.