Gentlemen and Gentlewoman,
I think we need a serious discussion about paywall content.
Personally, I am very annoyed by paywall content and I would prefer to don't see it on HN.
I think that paywall content are a serious treat to the openness of the community.
> I think we need a serious discussion about paywall content.
We've had this discussion ad nauseum. There will never be a consensus, but the HN question is settled. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
We all hate paywalls, but an HN without NYT, WSJ, The Economist, The New Yorker etc. would be much worse. These are sources of high-quality articles and intellectual curiosity is what HN tries to optimize for.
I'm thinking of adding the following to the FAQ to reduce the endless relitigation about paywalls that has been choking so many threads like a weed. Objections? Additions?
Is there a way to formalize a request for feature requests? It would be insane to ban paywalled content but I would very much like to see a small tag indicating paywalled content. It is easy to tell that NYT, WSJ etc are paywalled, and some even allow free viewing, however scientific papers and academia seem to have a higher proportion of such sites. Since this community is pretty STEM centic, a lot of papers, journals, and smaller subscription sites are posted here. If users could simply "tag as paywalled" it would be a timesaver and a rather nice feature. Thanks.
off-topic, but similar in notion:
Can we have a community rule that every 3rd post doesn't end up with a thread where people hyperbolize how terrible/awful/eyebleeding the design and usability of some web page is and we never get to discussing the content? At times these threads almost becomes indistinguishable from crappy satire and often end up dominating the discussion...and quite often the sites are perfectly fine and somebody just doesn't like the font choice or is trying to read a long form article on their watch or something.
I agree and used to flag them for that reason. Dang disagrees though and s/he's the moderator, so I stopped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9717601
The recent trend in paywalling is a negative one but it's not easy for any one aggregator (who isn't google) to punish the behavior. Consequently, a lot of a great content is paywalled.
Dang's disagreement is nonsensical however:
>You should flag stories because of content, not provenance.
How can I flag a story because of its content when I am unable to view the content? If a story has no content for me, I will likely flag it, sorry.
Many paywalled articles provide a way of getting around the paywall, for SEO purposes. Open it in a private window, or search it on Google, or in the case of Quora articles, add the share link. On some sites the "paywall" is a modal you can just delete in the browser. It's not really that nonsensical - those methods or alternative links will wind up being posted in a thread anyway. And a thread that doesn't provide any way of discussing the content should die on its own, because the comments will be nothing but complaints about the paywall.
Yeah, I'm not going to spend my time trying to figure out how to exploit a publishers' SEO marketing scheme just so that I can move through the magic referrer to get to the content at a URL.
If there is an easy alternative posted and the linkbait sounds compelling enough, I might try it.
Otherwise, it might get a flag for 'no content at this link'.
> Otherwise, it might get a flag for 'no content at this link'
Just so it's clear: this is a sure way to lose your flagging privileges on HN
Can you link me to HN's flagging rules and other moderation policies?
Are you seriously suggesting that someone from YCombinator will remove an account's flagging privileges because the account flagged links which did not point to any meaningful content?
What should we be flagging? Links to content that we disagree with?
Can we please bring back the reply to the above comment that said something like, "I've read enough of this person's comments to agree with having their flagging privileges removed"?
If there's a workaround and you don't use it, that's up to you. You're also unable to view an article if you refuse to click on it.
The choice is between two bad options: having to do a bit of work and losing many substantive articles. For HN, it's obvious which is the lesser evil. The policy has been the status quo here forever.
> The recent trend in paywalling
Is there a recent trend? The situation has seemed stable to me for a long time.
The last big shift was the New Yorker switching to a ponywall (i.e. letting incognito windows work) which, whatever it did for their economics, made the web and HN way better. Nautil.us recently introduced a paywall, but they love HN and are letting HN traffic through.
I certainly didn't see all this paywalling back in the days of Slashdot. Whether that was due to paywalling not being a thing or to Cmdr Taco's good discretion, I can't say.
Oh, I see. We're looking at different time scales. I was thinking the last couple years.
"Open Link in Incognito Window."
(Though I agree that paywalled content is a nuisance, albeit with some granularity regarding the necessity of paywalls to continued access to quality reporting.)
My take on this might be too pragmatic for your taste, but I think that as long as the paywall disappears if you enter through Google (as is usually the case), it's not more than a minor inconvenience.
I agree that content that isn't openly and globally available should be avoided.
many many moons ago, reddit had a special agreement with NYTimes to un-paywall any links from reddit (that neighborly deal expired a long time ago), but HN could potentially do the same magic with WSJ, NYT, Economist if someone did the dealmaking legwork.
So to verify, people should also not link to books, or to new releases of commercial software?
Please do link to good books and good software.
HN is a little like startup investing in that missing out on good posts is the worst that can happen. Bad posts suck too, but flagging and moderation work.
(To be clear, as it sounds like you might have missed this, I was being sarcastic to make a point that the argument that we should avoid "paywall" content is shortsighted and likely inconsistent even in the minds of the people complaining.)
If free software and open source software aren't the same thing... how is the content behind a paywall same as being "open"? Open means, IMO, freedom to do whatever you want with the content: One could take screenshots and/or copy paste content (more like CreativeCommons), which isn't even the point you're trying to make?
Is it only paywalled outside the UK? Would be a bit odd, but I can't think why else I'm not seeing it.
I'm also in the UK and don't see a paywall. Though I just figured it was because I'm using uBlock.
If you're using google, type cache: in front of the link. I.e. cache:www.economist.com/link