Is anyone experimenting with other models than personalized advertising or paywalls?
Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#12Community discussion seems like an interesting vehicle for article micro-payments.
Could someone try to negotiate a pooled deal with the WSJ based on a valid HN cookie with >X internet points? Or just a single subscription with the agreement that it would be scraped and self-hosted by the community?
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#13I think it's worth paying for good quality journalism. It's nice to support the institutions that serve a vital role to the checks and balances of our democracy.
Also, some of you may not know it but you can access the news for free through your local library. For example, I get the NY Times online via the Santa Clara County Library.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#14I agree with you but maybe the poster of the link sometimes forgets to be posting a paywalled page. In any case, how about making the HN submit page check the URL against a list of well known paywalls and warn the poster? There is a short list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Websites_utilizing_pa... and a longer one at https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#15I think it's worth paying for good quality journalism. It's nice to support the institutions that serve a vital role to the checks and balances of our democracy. Also, some of you may not know it but you can access the news for free through your local library. For example, I get the NY Times online via the Santa Clara County Library.
I agree with that in general, but which site or sites? I honestly don't read any particular news source enough to justify giving them as much as they ask. The intro rates seem to be pretty low for many, but then after 3 or 6 months they bump up to $15-$30/mo. I can't justify spending that much to read even 5-10 articles per month per site.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#16Community discussion seems like an interesting vehicle for article micro-payments. Could someone try to negotiate a pooled deal with the WSJ based on a valid HN cookie with >X internet points? Or just a single subscription with the agreement that it would be scraped and self-hosted by the community?
I like this. Would be cool to start a HN News fund
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#17Absolutely. They are perfectly entitled to put their content behind a paywall but they want to freeload off the open web driving traffic to their sites as well, they're parasites.
Might also lift discussions standards (pot meet kettle) if everyone could RTFA.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#18> How much time could we save each other by not linking to paywalls? Not very much? How much time do you really spend clicking "Back" after hitting a paywall? Most have very simple workarounds and/or someone will post an archive or outline link in the comments.
It's not just about wasting time. Often a headline will interest me, click, oops, nope, can't read it. Some stories certainly are genuinely unique to a particular news site, but often most of the NYT/WSJ/etc. articles posted aren't exactly high-quality and something very similar can be found on CNN, AP, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#19Another option would be a convention to add a tag that the article is paywalled.
... and ideally a way to optionally filter out all paywalled sites from the homepage.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#20I think it's worth paying for good quality journalism. It's nice to support the institutions that serve a vital role to the checks and balances of our democracy. Also, some of you may not know it but you can access the news for free through your local library. For example, I get the NY Times online via the Santa Clara County Library.
I did not know this! I would totally do this instead of going around them! Do you have more info on this?
(I do pay for those I really like, but for those in which I only read an occasional article or two, I don’t particularly feel like subscribing)