HN Explorer

Ask HN: Please stop sharing paywalled links or alike?

31 points by stefanos82 ↗ HN
I cannot view tweets anymore, nor can I read articles that force me to buy subscription and so forth.

Can HN please add a tag that say "paywalled" or something like that to warn me so I can simply avoid wasting a click?

I literally cannot do anything about it, until someone shares either an archived version of it or an alternative page that bypasses the paywall.

Cheers.

21 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] thread
gAI
Agreed! I flag tweets, but that's probably inappropriate.
s1artibartfast
Yes, that is inappropriate. Flagging should be reserved for spam and overtly hostile post
gAI
Yes, but I'm trying to stop living in a world of "shoulds."
s1artibartfast
what does that mean?
gAI
Functionally it means I've stopped holding myself and others to high standards.
s1artibartfast
I read this quote today and thought of you.

>It must be evident to you that manners must include all things which a man should impose upon himself, from duty to good taste. I have borne in mind the great motto of William of Wykeham--Manners makyth Man. It is in this sense--loyalty to the rule of obedience to the unenforceable, throughout the whole realm of personal action--that we should use the word "manners" if we would truly say that "Manners makyth Man."

-Lord Moulton. Reprinted in The Atlantic, July 1942.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1942/07/law-and...

beebeepka
I am often tempted to flag tweets, US propaganda, and blatant self and corporate promotion but it's pointless (even wrong) because it's like 50% of the content on this site. I don't even hit the hide button. Can't fight it. Better learn to ignore it.

Sorry for the defeatism

womitt
Put it to archive.is yourself - problem solved without large scale coordination
stefanos82
I have tried it once and did not let me do such thing; it complained I'm in Europe where GDPR is applied...maybe it was a glitch during that attempt?
Dwedit
Some people may be using aggressive script blocking, and not even know that the site they submitted is paywalled.
stefanos82
Many links here are paywalled and it's quite sad, because the title sounds interesting and I cannot tell whether it's a clickbait title or of valuable content.
skilled
Most content that is paywalled is instantly archived by someone who isn't even a HN user. You can go to Archive.is and click the 2nd form on the page (the one that checks if a link has been archived), and you're done. It takes a few seconds but it's better than not having these stories submitted to HN at all.
stefanos82
Thank you skilled, much appreciated! +1
dang
HN has had a consistent approach to this for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989. If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is also in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

This system doesn't work perfectly by a long shot but it's better than any of the alternatives I'm aware of.

The situation with Twitter is weird because last I checked (and I'm not checking it often), their login wall was supposed to be temporary.

stefanos82
> HN has had a consistent approach to this for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989.

> (From the link above) In the future, when someone doesn't understand this, please politely direct them to this thread or to HN's FAQ [1], which now makes this explicit.

Oh wow...in my case it's even worse!

Tweets that are now inaccessible; they get redirected back to twitter's main domain page!

Does it mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 it's not applicable anymore Dang?

dang
It's a special case. We need to wait and see if it stays that way. If it does, we'll either figure something out or ban the site, but for now I'm hoping the problem will just go away.
stefanos82
The problem I have just witnessed from other posts is that via comments users have been sharing tweets which are now inaccessible.

In other words, do we now have broken information if we cannot access any tweets so we could verify their validation?

jewel
This has been an issue discussed for a long time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989, as linked to from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, for some context as to why things are the way they are.

I personally agree with the decision. The discussion generated is still valuable even when I can't read the whole article. A lot of the paywalled sites are generating content that's more valuable than the average blog, which is why they're able to survive behind a paywall to begin with.

justsomehnguy
There were many articles here which were not accessible for me, yet the the comments (or an occassional bypass link) gave enough of context for a meaningful discussion.