Personally, I agree. I have no problem with paywalls, and actually subscribe to one paid site and wouldn't mind subscribing to more. But it can be pretty irritating for an aggregator. I go to paid sites individually, not from an aggregator.
Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#42Community 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
Thinking more about implementation - although users could use micro-transactions among themselves, providers might be more inclined to opt-in if we offered to pay by block. For example, if a paywall article starts ranking up, we could let the provider know to remove the paywall for certain duration. Kind of like a scheduled spot instance on a Cloud VM.
I bet there's a flag that toggles paywalls on articles and is easier for providers to implement than restrictive access.
Using our fund - we could then pay the provider. Assuming that an average top HN post gets 10K views - and each user pays $.05 per viewing. That makes a total of $500. We would give the provider an upfront payment of say $500 dollars based on estimations. A $20 contribution to the fund means almost 400 articles [enough for more than a year] on front-page paywalled subscriptions for a user.
So the spiel to providers are - we'll pay you $500 for 6 hours of free article read time. That's all they need to know. We handle collecting funds on our side from actual readers.
It's actually genius because content providers can write and support articles catered to a particular community and are incentivized because they don't have to worry about conversion of users to paid subscribers.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#43You should look up the many comments about this topic by HN moderator Dang:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The decision (and community consensus) is that paywalled sites are OK if there is a known workaround.
Usually someone will post a workaround in the comments.
Usually the workaround involves https://archive.is.
If none exists, the article shouldn't be on HN and you should flag it.
Longtime HN users accept that this is the least-worst resolution to the issue.
The more-worst version would be that nothing with a paywall is ever allowed, meaning that content from some of the world's leading publications (NY Times, Washington Post, The Economist, WSJ) would never be seen here.
HN could never claim to be a place for discussing the most important topics if those publications were excluded.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#44I 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.
Many of the major news sites in the USA are also available for free when on Starbucks Wi-Fi.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#45Is anyone experimenting with other models than personalized advertising or paywalls?
Many countries have state funded news organisations, BBC, A(ustralia)BC, DW, etc. It's a tried and proven model but many will here will be ideologically opposed to it.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#46I 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.
this is fine, but it's expensive to subscribe to all major news sites in the world.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#47Can we? I'm sure it's possible.
Will we? Probably not.
FYI: F12 > application > clear all site data works like 80% of time.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#48I 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 would be fine with paying for good quality journalism, none of it is though.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#49Sooo... not to rag on HN or anything, but this seems like the kinda thing that ought to be implemented as a user profile preference (e.g. a pay-wall boolean or perhaps even a whitelist). Because without getting into a philosophical debate, whether or not a user is interested in seeing submissions that are behind a paywall is most definitely a user preference.
Re: Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls?
#50How dare people ask for money.