If I repeatedly linked to my own site with a title that interested you but all you could see on my page was an unskippable ad demanding that you sign up and pay for my unrelated product, wouldn’t my site be banned from HN? Why do sites like nytimes get a free pass with their paywalls?
I feel the same way. My intuition tells me only some small percentage of HN readers have a NYT subscription, so these posts are of little use. Though the posts keep appearing, so perhaps I'm wrong, and it's really substantial...like at least 25%? What's the threshold where it makes sense?
I think of HN as like a social gathering. Each discussion thread is like a small group of people at a party standing around talking about some topic. It's a big party, and there are dozens of such small groups, constantly forming and breaking up, as people move from group to group.
If I'm at a party, and I see a group discussing a book they have read and I have not, I'm either going to ignore their discussion completely if I'm not interested in the topic or am planning on reading the book later and want to avoid spoilers, or go ahead and join in if I'm interested in the topic and and not worried about spoilers and they are discussing it in general enough terms.
I'm not going to try to tell everyone at the party that they should only talk about books that everyone there has read.
If there is some particular site(s) that someone just does not want to see on HN at all, it's easy to address that with a couple bookmarklets. Here's one that will hide NY Times articles from the listings:
javascript: (function () {
var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
for (var i = 0; i Here's one to unhide them:
javascript:(function () {
var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
for (var i = 0; i