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5 comments
Who are you to "call out" dang?
What you are arguing for, essentially, is for the mere existence of an article to be denied all HN readers unless you are being given free access to all of that article's content.
What you are arguing for, essentially, is for the mere existence of an article to be denied all HN readers unless you are being given free access to all of that article's content.
My extreme view is to just block.
But a more measured approach is to ensure it is flagged as a paywalled item.
But a more measured approach is to ensure it is flagged as a paywalled item.
The number of times I have read an interesting title, clicked a link, and then been hit with a paywall is too damn high.
Even worse, are the "delayed" paywalls, where you are allowed to read the first paragraph, and then when you scroll down (thanks to the header and menu + first para taking up an entire screen) you're hit either with a cutoff asking you to subscribe, a full page splash screen telling you to pay $.
I personally think that on a news aggregation site, there needs to at the very least, be a tag or small indicator next to each submission that there is a paywall. Perhaps have two types of tags (differentiated by color?) where "soft" paywall are separated from "hard" paywalls (soft paywalls being ones you can easily get around in incognito or a browser extension etc.)
Even worse, are the "delayed" paywalls, where you are allowed to read the first paragraph, and then when you scroll down (thanks to the header and menu + first para taking up an entire screen) you're hit either with a cutoff asking you to subscribe, a full page splash screen telling you to pay $.
I personally think that on a news aggregation site, there needs to at the very least, be a tag or small indicator next to each submission that there is a paywall. Perhaps have two types of tags (differentiated by color?) where "soft" paywall are separated from "hard" paywalls (soft paywalls being ones you can easily get around in incognito or a browser extension etc.)
Appreciate the confirmation that I'm not a lone, entitled asshat :). Sort of wishfully hoping this thread URL becomes a reference for HN admins to pay attention to the problem. It's real, and hurting HN.
Some paywalls have gotten harder to bypass since then. Personally, I subscribe to the NYT, WaPo, and theinformation.com, some can be read in incognito mode, and I've given up in exasperation with the WSJ and foreignpolicy.com.
I'd love to see a startup do a Spotify-for-news model, where I pay $10/mo and they allocate it to all the news sites proportional to clicks or time spent. Surprisingly, dealing with newspapers is even more impossible than dealing with music labels.