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jefftk
> News should be free

How do you propose news be funded?

ixtli
Publicly, for instance.

I think this is bad faith because it’s clear OP means it should be free at point of use. I doubt they’re arguing the people who create it shouldn’t be compensated. There are many ways to do this.

endisneigh
Why would the government fund news criticizing it, unless you had a different definition of publicly in mind?
allendoerfer
How do you think courts or parliaments are funded? The same argument applies here. Why should the fourth power be any different than the second or third?
endisneigh
I’m not making an argument, I’m asking why would the government do this, now especially.

Why not maintain the status quo?

Ajedi32
Fair point, but consider that the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of government is enforced by the constitution. Without a constitutional amendment, a fourth "public information" branch would have no such protection.

Furthermore, consider that these days even the courts (which are supposed to be politically neutral) have become highly politicized. I can't think of any reason why a supposedly neutral fourth branch of government would be any better in that regard.

allendoerfer
I do not know for sure about the US constitution, but my constitution already has freedom of press in it. I guess the press would have to distribute the money by themselves, the government would just hand it over.
throwaway277360
Exactly. If the King paid for the newspaper, he would de-fund them if they reported news that went against the King. The fourth estate must remain independent.
pietrovismara
The same exact statement is true for private ownership. The difference is that with public funding you can legislate to prevent governments to interfere with the news outlets. When they are privately owned on the other hand, you have no control over it.
MichaelBurge
The government funds a Supreme Court that rules to overturn its own legislation, often criticizing it in the process.
pietrovismara
Why would private investors fund news criticizing them?
jefftk
As long as you have many different news outlets owned by different investors this should be ok?
Miner49er
Except wealthy people still own the vast majority, so news will generally favor the wealthy.
pietrovismara
The problem is that the interests of the private investors converge. The best we can hope from them is to fight each other, but they won't ever attack the system that keeps them all rich.
spacemanmatt
The public should not care why its government might not like to fund news criticizing it. Just governments tolerate and respond to criticism.
Ensorceled
The US is currently dismantling their Post Office, which is required to be funded by their Constitution. In Canada, we have publicly funded news (the CBC) but one of the major political parties runs on a platform of destroying it every election.
breckenedge
> The US is currently dismantling their Post Office

Where did you read this? The US postal system is not being dismantled, it’s meant to be self funded and it cannot meet its financial obligations.

> required to be funded by their Constitution.

It only empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." That’s the entire Post Office clause.

sofixa
> it’s meant to be self funded and it cannot meet its financial obligations

Since when are public services required to be self funded? Are the army, police or DMV self funded? And don't their obligations included obviously biased ( in favour of painting the post office as a financially ruinous institution and privatise/dismantle it) provisions for full pensions of future employees, which nobody else does, anywhere?

breckenedge
It’s that way because Congress makes it that way. That’s how they decided to run it and they are the only people able to change it.
dwheeler
I know of no requirement in the US Constitution that the US government fund the US Post Office.

The US Constitution grants Congress the authority to do so if it chooses to, and historically it has chosen to. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads."

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause

I do think that the US government should ensure that you should ensure that the mail continues. I just wanted to clarify that government isn't obligated to pay for it.

afarrell
I think it is good faith because it points out the unintended consequences of the action that OP advocates: quality journalism goes underfunded and the cohesion of society suffers —- unless there is also a proposal for how to differently fund journalism.
Ekaros
So like BBC or Pravda? I don't trust publicly funded organisations with important things like news not to be corrupted and start serving only certain political agenda.
pietrovismara
So you'd rather trust Rupert Murdoch to make your interest? Because it is 100% guaranteed that his news outlets are going to serve only his political agenda.
ixtli
More to this point: you have some form of redress against the government. None against Murdoch unless you are very rich.

If this isn’t obvious then you don’t know much about the BBC. If anything, I’d argue they spend too much time hand-wringing about listener / viewer complaints.

[dead] Ensorceled
Maybe journalists should do all that work for Clout and love of their craft.

If they were real journalists, they'd be homeless for our benefit and amusement.

junon
Bad faith arguments are discouraged on HN.
throwawayswede
So should be quoting HN rules without explaining exactly and very specifically how and what you're referencing applies.
junon
"Bad faith" is pretty self-explanatory, is it not? Of course it was sarcasm, the point being made is a bad faith assumption of the GP's point.
throwawayswede
The point is not in explaining "bad faith", but in explaining how and why the comment you're replying to is "bad faith". Was not clear to me at all that you were being sarcastic.
junon
We're running in circles a bit here but the author of the comment I responded to claimed in a followup comment that it was sarcasm. Sarcasm and bad/good faith discussion are mutually exclusive.
throwawayswede
Inception level guessing and assumptions you're making all in this thread.
Ensorceled
It's sarcasm, not bad faith.
spacemanmatt
Please remember Poe's law, and how constantly applicable it is here
Ensorceled
Sigh. I mean, I thought I was way outside the realm of Poe's law with that one ... guess not.
MrFlibbles
It works for a great deal of Software Development.
Ensorceled
It actually also works for a large amount of journalism.

There is also a fair amount of journalism that is being self funded now.

OneTimePetes
By estimating the damage done to society by under-reporting, schedule half of said damage from tax-money into a fund, and make user reading a similar themed news-page, allocate a small percentage of said fund to the newspaper. The fewer articles a user reads, the more valuable a single "read" becomes.

The system is gambled with tons of faked users. A Issue on which the journalists are reporting. It becomes economic unfeasible to do anything else then click bait journalism..

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OneTimePetes
The first post below is usually archive.linkname.is something..

Or you can just inspect the paywall away.

parenthesis
It can be interesting and useful to read the comments of those who have been able to read a paywalled article.
junon
This. Usually someone posts an archived link, somehow.
EastOfTruth
This is usually for the soft-paywalls (archival sites are not blocked from viewing the content, sometimes).
tyingq
The current system seems to assume that we're all familiar with things like "pasting a doi link into scihub" and "pasting a url into archive.is".

I'm not a fan of reg walls and pay walls either, but if we ban content from there, you lose a lot of sources.

I suspect it doesn't really come to a decision point while reasonable workarounds exist.

1cvmask
Instead of a blacklist there could be a optional paywall indicator when you post a link.
fsloth
I don't understand why high quality journalism should be free. Free journalism needs to pay for itself, which results mostly in click-bating. I'm sure HN has a large segment of relatively affluent people who are at least curious about high quality content available. And usually some helpful soul has archived the result, and papers with doi are trivial to find from sci-hub (bless her!).
Maledictus
I filter links on HN to known paywall sites using uBlock origin.
scottndecker
Yes, and the people who went out and did the research, took the photos, wrote the stories, and performed the studies should all work for free too. (sarcasm)

The example you gave is a study from a journal. Quite a difference from "news" as most would think of it (CNN, Fox, etc) which are free.

sc90
Domain blacklisting is a bit harsh, it'd be better to mark a link as paid/free.
irchans
Alternatively, the links to paid sites could be colored differently or marked with a dollar sign. Maybe users could have an option to filter out paywalled links.
mrspence
By act of community voting, paywall articles like that one don't perform as well on Hacker News and therefore get filtered out, correct?
TimMeade
I think it should be annotated somewhere. I for one would not click on a link, giving it more exposure, if i knew it was paid. Unless i was already a subscriber of that particular service.
Ensorceled
I'm not sure why you are unwilling to provide "exposure" to content that is worthy of being on Hacker News?
belorn
Is it worthy to be on hacker news if a majority can't access it?

Every time I see this topic being discussed, the general answer is that there has always existed a method to bypassing payment. Top comment (or close to the top) there will be an outline or other bypass being posted.

One could make an argument that HN should make a special link, next to the article, where the bypass link can be highlighted. The only risk is that by acknowledging this, HN could be sued for a practice that has so far been standard practice in the last several years.

0des
Tagging the paid links is an easy compromise that doesnt result in banning anything. However, it does make me wonder, if the publisher effectively banned me from their content, why should there not be a quid pro quo on behalf of the drivers of clicks. Does anybody know of any instances where a publisher acknowledges that HN sends a fair bit of traffic their way, and when a link is referred via HN it bypasses the wall entirely? That would be smart, and respectful.
neltnerb
I suppose places used to do this for Google. Not sure if they still do, but I remember if you searched for an article on Google there was a period in time where it would bypass the paywall you'd have hit going directly to the article.
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neltnerb
Yeah, annotation like we do for PDFs or videos seems like a good idea. I certainly don't subscribe to a news source linked just for one article.

Though I don't really want to give clicks to the many many articles that are either a direct copy-paste or a trivial commentary about an actual source. Those are worse. At least the paywall is honest, giving ad revenue to a 3rd party presenting content they copy as their own is way worse.

brightball
Nah, don't ban it. I've learned more ways to bypass paywalls from paid stuff being posted here than anywhere else. Keep it coming.
samizdis
Your point is a good one, but there are often workarounds for content that is otherwise paywalled. For instance, ft.com content is (mostly) paywalled on its own site, but a fair bit is syndicated elsewhere (sometimes in ArsTechnica, for instance) and searching for a headline often provides an alternative source with no paywall.

Other workarounds involve archive services, or, in the case of your example, things like this:

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/00207314211015806

Elsewhere, HN readers sometimes provide relevant extracts of paywalled articles in comments.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. I don't like being excluded from content, but there are often ways to read it anyway.

Miner49er
I think OP's point is why not just post the sci-hub link in the first place? Instead of having users have to go find it themselves.
detaro
> What's the point of hacker news if the pages for many of the links cannot be read without subscription.

Which is why the site rules explicitly allow paywalled content as long as a paywall workaround exists.

kwertyoowiyop
Good idea.

I do not agree that all news should be free, but am fine with only posting free links on HN.

throwawayswede
I'd agree, but only for journals funded with public money. Otherwise, no, news shouldn't necessarily be free. And this is not "news" exactly. Analysis articles cost money to produce and write, their authors should be allowed to ask for as much money as they see fair (just like how a webdesigner asks for as much as they see fit) then competition takes over and the free market does its thing.

Ban those journals that cut both ways in money making, but don't ban paywalled websites. Could possibly be a filter but then that's out of HN's scope. Your best option is to block them yourself (which I already do.)

ysavir
The funny thing is, most of those HN threads have a top comment with a link to an archived/visible copy of the article, making it easier to access that link than if found in other places.

Other than that, HN articles are upvoted to the front page, not there naturally, and if enough people are commenting/upvoting, I think that indicated it's worth sharing despite the paywall.

And sometimes the best discussion derives from the subject in the headline without any actual relation to the article itself, and I'd hate to lose out on that discussion due to rules or automatic filtering.

I know it's frustrating, and I'm been blocked out of reading those articles on HN a daily basis, but I still prefer the status quo to one where those subjects and deriving discussions never have a chance in the first place.

0des
Ive chosen not to use archive links. If a publisher uses paywalls, the message is clear.
sofixa
That they prefer not to rely on clickbait, user data and intrusive ads?
0des
Pardon me for asking; is this a question?
sofixa
Kind of. What's the clear message you deduce from a publisher having a paywall?
0des
"This is not content for the greater un-vetted public" in my opinion it squelches the voice of an otherwise informed outsider, and narrows the conversational possibilities to those who agree with the author ostensibly because they pay a subscription. Whether intentional or not, paywalls are ideological filters in outcome.
ysavir
I thought the message was "we want your money"
ianai
If you’re posting something you should have read it enough to give a synopsis for it. So head to the comments and give a breakdown of the key points. Ie the OP should have access to read whatever they post.

Yes this is “optimistic” thinking for the internet. But HN can definitely do better.

pxhb
I would prefer a paywall flag over an outright ban. News should be free, but we also shouldn’t be ignorant of what’s going on in the world.

Ideally (for me) the system would be something like this:

-Primary source is used with Paywall flag, and submissions under this flag decay off the front page faster unless there is engagement

-HN culture that rewards users with finding alternative free reporting

-HN culture that rewards users with providing a good high-level summary of paywalled material

throaway6942
This is a bad idea imo.

If not anything the comments are valuable. More than once I subscribed to something based on a article I found on HN.

(also usually someone posts a non-paywalled link)

[dead] spacemanmatt
I regret that I have but one upboat to give for my country.
3pt14159
I disagree that news should be free, but the present situation is crazy. I'd pay a healthy (~$50?) amount of money per month if there was something that just worked in my browser and paid serious news orgs some percentage of my money without me having to download some stupid news app.

I've signed up for various online news sources before, but the experience still sucks because only 0.5% of the news links on places like HN were covered by the subscription.

neltnerb
I used to pay for news websites, but then they kept tracking me with cookies and 3rd party javascript anyway.

They can have one or the other... I am not doing both and told them so. They're still doing it, but at least I'm not supporting it.

sofixa
Web monetization, the standard, is supposed to cover that precise use case. Sadly it's not exactly popular.