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Comment by mst | Hacker News Reader

@dang: Can somebody please tag WSJ articles as paywalled? I am getting deeply bored of seeing the domain name and clicking through anyway thinking this would be something I could actually read.

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Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989. As long as the paywalls have workarounds, they're ok here. They suck and are annoying to everyone, but HN would be worse without WSJ, NYT, the New Yorker, the Economist, etc., so this is a lesser-evil solution. Hopefully someone will eventually fix publishing on the web, and then we won't have either the paywall problem or the paywall complaint problem.

The situation is made less annoying by users posting workarounds in the threads, which they usually do, and have done in this one.

And for those of us who are not frequent consumers of their content, we don't even need a work-around. The paywall only kicks in after a quota has been hit.

I'm apparently for whatever reason in the category of "gets insta-paywalled, no quota, incognito mode doesn't help" but the comments elsethread making clear that many others aren't suggests to me that I was overestimating the actual annoyance level caused across the userbase, so the current policy now makes much more sense to me.

Thanks for the explanation.

Incognito mode often doesn't help for me either, but if you look for workarounds posted in the threads, you'll usually find one. It's also ok to ask for one.

Thanks! All things considered, I have only one thing to say: Please excuse my being a miserable bastard.

We are all miserable bastards.

It's a soft paywall that only kicks in after you have used up your monthly free quota. If are a regular visitor, you should consider a subscription. Otherwise, you have 2 options.

A) Open the link incognito mode

B) Go to http://archive.is/ and enter the link there.

Quality journalism costs money. I actually prefer WSJ, NTY, and WaPo's approach of pushing for a subscription model over ad based models.

I don't think I've visited WSJ and it instantly paywalled me. Same in private mode.

Same for me, never visited, using private browser, still no article to read.

I need a workaround at work, but not at home. You're probably on a IP that has heavily used the free content.

I have a fixed IP, always the same. Only me and my wife uses it ever. None of us reads this page normally.

You can bypass the paywall with some referrers like Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=LINK_GOES_HERE

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