Comment by rory096 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rory096 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. It's explicitly allowed.

>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&...

Thank you. I didn't see it in the faq. Is it something one could suggest mandatory tagging for? Like [video] and [pdf], since a curious looking link might not be worth clicking if a) you need to wait for it to download or play, or b) you have to pay or go and hunt search engines to track down the content.

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.

It's not that inconvenient, though annoying. Well over 90% of the paywalled articles are from the same handful of major sites with known, standard workarounds. Considering the quantity of articles we look at I'd be surprised if we weren't going through it more than anyone else 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.

I didn't flag it, and I wasn't advocating that. I asked about tagging.

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 didn't flag it, and I wasn't advocating that. I asked about tagging.

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.

In the case of WSJ, the workaround seldom if ever work.

For a discussion site, the inability to RTFA to discuss it is a significant impairment.

> In the case of WSJ, the workaround seldom if ever work

Precisely the opposite is true in my case. I google the headline and a link to the article comes up.

For the current instance (China devalues yuan), the Google search itself bloats to 2GB and crashes. The comments on the article both refer to the paywall.

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.

What would your feeling be about a mandatory tag for paywalled content, like the [pdf] and [video] tags. Pdf in particular, to me, seems less problematic than paywall content, though video I can understand is worse for many people. Is it worth an Ask HN topic?

That would help.

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.

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