paywall
>Thanks for being concerned for the quality of HN! We're grateful for users like you. But please don't flag stories only because of a paywall. Accounts that repeatedly do so lose their flagging rights. You should flag stories because of content, not provenance.
>The HN guidelines explicitly call for original sources. We want the best, most substantive version of a story. Other things being equal, we all prefer non-paywalled articles, but when things are not equal, substance should win.
>Compare the WSJ piece to the originally submitted URL in this case (it's mentioned upthread). There's no question which one belongs on HN.
>When there are standard workarounds to read the content, paywalls are just an inconvenience.
>The more this comes up [1], the clearer it gets that we shouldn't ban paywalls. The NYT, New Yorker, Economist, WSJ, and others are major sources. HN would be poorer without them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9717601
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10007470
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...
That way the inconvenience can be chosen by people who are particularly interested in the topic, but the content is still welcome to be here.
I haven't gotten around to adding this to the FAQ yet, but will.
Flagging an article that's otherwise good for HN, purely because it's behind one of these semi-paywalls, is not an ok use of flagging. We revoke flagging rights from accounts that do that.
Thanks for the plan on the FAQ. I'm sure it is just something you osmose being here for a while. I'm sure if the article looked interesting enough I'd spend the time going through the standard workaround, but so far things haven't surpassed the 'does it look worth it' threshold, given how much interesting content there is that doesn't involve hoop-jumping. Which is why I think it might be a user-benefiting mandatory-tag, so people don't have to click through before finding that out, as [video], [pdf] and the year for old posts. At the very least people will know to copy the title into google rather than clicking through, hitting back, then copying it into search.
Thanks for the upkeep of the site generally, also. It's such a good and interesting resource.
I probably posted a generic reply instead of answering your specific question. Sorry about that. In general, we're reluctant to add tags for things like that. The noise might outweigh the signal, and HN has always been a bare-bones operation. But we'll think about it.
For a discussion site, the inability to RTFA to discuss it is a significant impairment.
Precisely the opposite is true in my case. I google the headline and a link to the article comes up.
This is highly typical.
I've flagged in past. I won't in future. But it's decidedly annoying, ranking well up with Scribd and Quora.
As it stands, I actively avoid wsj.com content, largely on the basis of assuming it's going to be paywalled (this isn't always the case), but increasingly too, for presumed corporate / editorial bias.
It'll be interesting to see how long Murdoch can strip-mine WSJ's goodwill.