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Comment by metafunctor | Hacker News Reader

The subject says it all, but am I the only one who isn't a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal? Is there no free source on the Internet for this same piece of news?

I'm not saying everything should be free. I build paid-for services on the web myself. But how is “To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In” useful on the Hacker News?

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Plus, if you give in and subscribe to the WSJ they go out of their way to make it difficult to unsubscribe, requiring users to call in by phone and be subjected to a sales pitch just to cancel the recurring charges. It's a very scummy retention tactic.

It's so common, it's ridiculous. The NYT has the same policy, and you have to call in on certain days of the week at certain times. They even published an opinion piece decrying the practice while participating in it.

The call centre employees will even discount your subscription to try to keep you. Not at all cool.

I finally started letting Amex sort this out. I'll attempt to call to cancel a service (during my local business hours), follow up with a short letter if the call is unsuccessful.

After that, any new charges that appear result in a call to the Amex Fraud Dept. Sadly there have been a couple services I had to do this with.

I had the same thing with the Times (Murdoch-owned) in the UK. I remember that I got through on the phone but they said that it wouldn't be possible to cancel my account without charging the next two (monthly) billing cycles.

I cancelled my card and somehow they managed to cancel the account once payment didn't go through.

Only fucking subscribed because of one article we were in, ended up paying for almost a year of none-usage.

I had a subscription to sugarsync for a few months longer than I needed due to their "cancellation dept" only being open a few hours a day in some far off timezone. Hateful.

Fyi: I subscribed briefly through their iOS app. The Apple app store allows you to easily manage subscriptions made through any app from the store, which made it much easier to cancel.

Is this true for a digital only subscription as well?

Yes.

Plus, you'd be giving resources to News Corp.

Because sometimes they break stories and have exclusive content and in depth info that others won't have immediately if ever. For example they were ahead of everyone with the Theranos news.

I think the idea of putting links on HN is its better to know about it asap, rather than possibly using a slower or less comprehensive source.

That's a good point, and I applaud the Wall Street Journal for their journalistic efforts. I'm thinking we should get a WSJ subscription in our company.

I'm not so sure if Hacker News should be an outlet for breaking news. The HN platform is not very well suited for real-time news in general.

Myself, I use Hacker news for "daily important news" much less than breaking news.

I don't like getting into word definition argument but doesn't that information about Samsung fall under the daily important news rather than the breaking news ?

Yes, it does. That's why I'd like to see a link to a free source (that doesn't require one to pull ostentibly illegal tricks to read the contents) rather than an advertisement.

Ah, my bad. I misinterpreted.

But is this exclusive content?

Is there anything in the WSJ article that isn't in another source, like The Telegraph?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/10/11/samsung-tel...

Bloomberg story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/samsung-e...

BBC News:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37618618

> Because sometimes they break stories and have exclusive content and in depth info that others won't have immediately if ever

This story has been in Reddit home page for last 14 hours pointing to the original source on the official Samsung website[1]. This content is neither exclusive nor breaking.

[1] https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-will-ask-all-global-...

That's not exactly true. The story that's been floating around for 14 hours is that sales have been put on hold and all units should be recalled.

This WSJ article on samsung PERMANENTLY discontinuing sales is a substantially different development.

Bloomberg actually had it almost two hours earlier than WSJ. I've just posted it to HN just now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684081

Yeah, but Bloomberg publishes a lot of rubbish. Rumours and lots of secondary news, so you never know if it is true.

re: the parent's downvoters:

ok, so @arjie is a bit on the snarky side, but he does have a point.

>I think the idea of putting links on HN is its better to know about it asap, rather than possibly using a slower or less comprehensive source.

I agree, but in light of the comments above about their horrific and unethical subscription-cancellation policies and practices, I think there should be a clear warning attached to every link from a news source like this, highlighting exactly what you're getting into if you choose to subscribe in order to read the article.

Use the web link at the top. Even better is that you get an AMP version of the story.

The web link at which top? The link on news.ycombinator.com, which I was responding to, goes to a paywall teaser.

The "web" in this line, just below the title. It takes you to a google search.

The link at the top of the google result of the headline you should search. (But if you enjoy the WSJ, consider picking up a subscription or a paper from time to time.) :)

Just below the headline in hackernews, you'll see a small "toolbar" of links:

The OP was referring to the one that says "web"

Interesting, didn't realize the Hacker News had a paywall workaround built in.

Let's just hope Rupert Murdoch doesn't sue us all.

I hope he does try to sue for a link to google which has a link to his own site which behaves in a certain way based on the if HTTP_REFERER header says it was from google. He could stop the behavior at any time by changing his own code. It would set a good public precedent to help curtail such buffoonery moving forward.

That hasn't worked for me, for several months now. I've had good luck with a Firefox add-on called Paywall-pass, though.

Rather than a down-vote, I'd be interested in some suggestions about what I'm doing wrong.

1. Click "web" (or alternately, Google the title of the article, verbatim from the article itself)

2. Click the appropriate link from Google, so that my referrer will be google.com.

When I do that, I still get the pay-walled article. I've tried deleting my wsj cookies and doing the same. I've tried using another computer on another network, with the same result.

That raises two questions for me: What am I doing wrong? Why do I get dinged without explanation for suggesting a second approach that does work for me?

Google the title of the article. Follow the link from Google and voila. A free version of the article.

This is what I came to say. Not sure why that works, but it does!

Google discourages websites from appearing in search but requiring registration to view. If the website detects that the user came from a Google search, they don't throw up the paywall.

Because google will ban the page if the crawled content is not the same as the displayed content when you click their link.

Because due to a black hat trick called cloaking [1], Google penalizes pages that show different content to users and crawlers. So web sites serve a free version of their content to Google.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en

This is a "black hat trick"?

WSJ's reporters and servers are funded by money, not nice words on HN. I don't understand everyone's obsession with bypassing paywalls on news links. I occasionally buy paper copies of newspapers.

If Google refers you to the article from its search results, you can see the whole thing. Try searching for the headline!

OK. So it's the old "Google for the URL or title" and you may get the content thing.

Am I the only one who thinks this sucks? If so, I will bite my lip and shut up.

I believe in the open Internet. I don't even run an ad blocker for sites that aren't complete assholes with their ads.

But this is just stupid.

Look dude, if you hate it so much, buy a subscription.

You sound entitled. Be glad you can use the google referral trick at all.

I don't mind buying things I find valuable. I do that all the time.

However, I think Hacker News is not supposed to be a place where ads to buy subscriptions are among the top news.

Fuck the article if it compromises your values been on top of HN. Just read the comments. I do it all the time and I know I’m not the only one.

What would you have them do instead?

I don't love it, but I don't have a problem with it, mostly because I have no idea what other route they could take.

Ad-supported is something Buzzfeed can make viable, but it means tailoring both the substance and the form of their content to optimize for that. Doesn't work for WaPo.

I'm fine with the WSJ doing this. Businesses are free to monetize their content as they see fit.

I don't like that a link to a WSJ paygate page gets this amount of votes on Hacker News, when there are numerous free links available for the same information.

If anything, I'm saying "don't vote for paygate links" to whoever clicked to upvote on the OP link.

It's the newspaper themselves who bypass their own firewall when you come from google. They can easily disable it if they want to.

They have to be very careful -- Google's guidelines are very strict about content that they index. If you display different content to a user than the content that Google has indexed, that will cause Google to drop the page from their index, and may affect the overall quality rating for your site in Google's index.

Nobody really wants to cross them here; if you want your content indexed and displayed in search results, you have to show the full content to users inbound from search result pages.

Not exactly. Google actually allows some sort of "google bot" login and see as well as this : https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543

True, but they could just show google the same thing they show users who are not logged in. They just choose not to.

Delete your *.wsj.com cookies, use a referrer control addon and set it to google.com for wsj.com and enjoy clicking HN links and not see the content block.

thanks for the tip, it worked wonderfully.

Or just use a referer switcher like Referer Control on Chrome for all clicks in the wsj.com domain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684081

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