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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

[Flagged] is done by user flags, and while I of course can't know why other users flagged something, here are possible reasons:

a) WSJ has a paywall where the Google workaround often doesn't work

b) political topics always are at risk, especially if repeated:

c) That there have been 5 submissions with together >300 comments on that topic in the last week: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=seattle+Minimum+Wage&sort=byDa... , which seem to discuss the same study, making your submission clearly a duplicate (at least from what I can see from the text teaser, thanks to a) I can't actually read the full content)

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Thanks,

a) doesn't seem like it should matter, that's the way the web is going. b) i saw this article as more scientific than political. This is the closest thing you get to a controlled experiment in economics research. c) Fair. I didn't catch that this had been posted. I did a simple search with the 'past' link and didn't find anything.It seems like a flagging should require a rationale from the flagger.

For a link aggregator, where people discuss the content of links, of course it matters if people can actually read the content of the submission! The mods previously have stated that easy workarounds like google search are tolerated, but that fails with WSJ and I know that not all users agree on that.

I agree with you in principle, but in practice you'd need to exclude all the major outlets. That's a pretty big hole in media coverage.

In either case, flagging the post with a reason would be an educational benefit to the poster and the readers.

> I agree with you in principle, but in practice you'd need to exclude all the major outlets. That's a pretty big hole in media coverage.

WSJ is (as far as I know) the only major one that doesn't meet the "easy to circumvent" rule. And the "major outlets" predominantly post general news, which is less relevant to HN.

> a) doesn't seem like it should matter,

Every. single. thread. that links to a WSJ article has people complaining about the paywall, and people asking for the link to be changed to a different source.

As a result, I imagine there are plenty of people who flag WSJ articles by default, regardless of what way the web is going.

Thanks. That is annoying I just wish it were clearer why downvotes and flags were happening. It would probably prevent people like me from posting from thise sources in the future.

from the FAQ[1]:

>Are paywalls ok?

>It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

The implication is that paywalls without workarounds (like WSJ) aren't OK.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I can always read WSJ articles by searching for the title in Facebook search then clicking through from the official WSJ posting.

That workaround is often mentioned in the HN discussion threads, so it's fairly well known.

If this method accessible for people who don't want to use Facebook? If not, then I would not consider it a general circumvention measure.

If you don't want to use Facebook, pasting a WSJ link into outline.com will also yield the full article:

https://outline.com

Of course you're fully entitled to not use Facebook, but that needn't deprive everyone else of being made aware of the content and being able to access and discuss it, either by using the Facebook workaround or paying for a subscription.

Facebook has over 2Bn users. Many of them are on HN. The debate about whether or not that's a good thing is orthogonal to the fact that Facebook search is a viable workaround that allows the anyone who chooses to use it, the option of reading WSJ articles.

I'm down with discouraging paywall content. I've never flagged an article for it though. I get HN through the Feedly app, so I can't tell where the link goes until I hit it. It's always a nuiscance when it ends up at some paywall site.

On the other hand, those paywall sites do tend to be very high quality, with longform articles and more citations, more depth than most. I'll give them that.

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