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Comment by rw2 | Hacker News Reader

Can we not post anything with paywalls or just give the non-paywall link.

This makes it inaccessible for most HN users.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920832 and the announcement linked from there.

This comes up every now and then, and the moderators' response so far was to focus on the content. Because of country restrictions, IP restrictions, publisher's cookie policies, monthly free article quotas, per-article exemptions, corporate (or personal) subscriptions and availability of the article through Google search (or "web" link) it's hard to say what percentage of HN readership can see the contents.

The worst that can happen is that articles from a heavily paywalled site (ft.com, nature.com, theinformation.com) don't seem to get upvoted much, meanwhile articles from not so restrictive sources (wsj.com, nytimes.com) do make it to the front page occasionally, so I'm assuming a good portion of those votes come from readers actually capable of reading the full contents.

With the NYT, I can just hit CTRL-SHIFT-N and get around the paywall. With the WSJ, not so much- the directions given in this thread don't even seem to work.

>This comes up every now and then, and the moderators' response so far was to focus on the content.

The problem with this methodology is that if one cannot see the content, it cannot be focused on.

Just click on the web link right under the title (within Hacker News).

If I do that, I'm brought to a Google search where TFA is result #1 and this HN post is #2. If I click on #1, I hit the paywall. Is this not what is supposed to happen?

Works for me to bypass the paywall.

The point of the Google search is to take advantage of Google's "First Click Free"[1]. Quoting: "A user coming from the domain [.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day."

1: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en...

I get this too, because I refuse to send referer(sic) headers and have disabled them in my browser settings. To use the 'one weird trick' of doing a Google search, you need to send the referer info saying you came from a Google search link.

Try checking your browser's privacy settings, or test using a site like this: https://www.darklaunch.com/tools/test-referer

This debate has been played out in a number of previous discussions, and it was decided that paywalled articles were okay. It was further found that the paywall was not a proper subject of discussion.

I did not take a view at the time, but thought you should know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com