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Comment by metafunctor | Hacker News Reader

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metafunctor

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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