Block submission whose link requires payment to read content

14 points·royalghost··8 comments

Hi team @ Y-Combinator

Can you block any submission whose url requires payment in order to read the news ?

For e.g. one of the top links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529944 point to a WSJ article that requires payment to read the article.

Instead, the user can submit a related news from another news source that is free.

View on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks you to e-mail the mods if you want to reach them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html contains the rules for paywalled articles: they are already not allowed if there is no known workaround.

workaround in bookmarklet form:

javascript:location.href='http://facebook.com/l.php?u='+location.href

I think what I've seen previously is people just flag the articles until they're removed.

I wonder why they haven't banned wsj urls by now

Because they don't break the rules as they are (workarounds exist, e.g. by going through facebook's external redirector https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=), and the mods think having high-quality original sources is worth the tradeoff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531085 (Which is a comment on the specific example the OP mentioned)

This isn't about contacting the mods - people expressed their opinion about paywalled links already - but more about having a wider discussion about this issue.

It starts with "Hi Team @ YCombinator", that did sound like someone wanting to talk to the mods.

Install adblock. Right click on overlay > adblock > block this ad until it goes away. (you'll notice the scrollbar has disappeared (B). Run this in inspect scripts - element.style {overflow: scroll;height: 100%;}. Alternatively: buy all the subscriptions

Remove the overlay and you'll still only see a snippet of the article.

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