Ask HN: Should HN ban paywalled articles?

13 points by ofou ↗ HN

8 comments

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I think the current policy of allowing them as long as there's a workaround is fine. What do you think is wrong with that?
Rather than workarounds, it is preferable to have media on The Internet free by default, since there are so many workarounds for people who don't want to pay a cent for anything on the web. Yes, news outlets need to make money, but there are other ways of doing that instead of relying on 'paywalls'. Why not the sponsored articles route (providing you let your readers know for sure it's sponsored)?
"Show me a 10ft paywall, I'll show you a 12ft ladder" - 12ft.io
Give me some climbing spikes and 10 good men and I'll breach that paywall. ;-)
How about adding a (paywall) to the end of posts like most people do (video) or (pdf) now?
No. There's good content on some of those articles. We shouldn't hamper discussion because some users hit a paywall. Other users have subscriptions and get value from HN on the topic. There are also a variety of workarounds that technically savvy users of this site can employ.
I think it would be great to have a paywall tag. Usually I click on an article on HN only to discover that I can't read it because of a paywall. I then check the comments if someone has posted a link to a workaround. If there is no link I have to find out how to avoid paywall articles. Nowadays I just try to remember which sites have paywalls and avoid them but this doesn't scale well