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cfv

That paywall just led to me blacklisting the entire economist.com domain at extension level.

Too bad.

Don't do paywalls like that please.

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If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

What would you prefer them to do?

- There are plenty of good reasons against using the typical ad platforms, and the increasing adoption of ad blockers shows that users don't like them

- Hosting your own ads is hard in the internet and doesn't seem very profitable

- Running the website as a marketing expense to increase sales of the paper version used to work, but now people just stay on the website

- Microdonation platforms like flattr fail to gain any traction

Unless you somehow find good journalists that work for free a model of allowing X article reads per month before requiring payment seems like the best model available.

>Microdonation platforms like flattr fail to gain any traction

What about Wikipedia?

I run my website in this fashion.

Patreon also works great for some sites (and not at all for some others).

To be honest, I don't particularly like Wikipedia's huge banners with pleas to get the last few millions in donations. If every site did that users were as annoyed as they are by regular ads.

A donation model might be the best thing to do, we just have to find the best way to implement it.

I used to feel guilty about the Wikipedia donation banner, but so much of that spending seems to go elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Was wikipedia really 3.5x more expensive to host in 2016 than 2010? Why? (Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 )

Is that annoyance worse than being blocked from the page?

EDIT: serious question, because if it is, I can restrict content on my website.

It can be, especially if everyone starts doing it--as is increasingly the case. At some point, I'm fine with just doing without sites that have a hard paywall whereas having all, or at least many/most, sites annoy me for donations/subscriptions degrades using the Internet as a whole.

It's the only site on the I internet that tells me I've read all of my free monthly articles every time I link to it.

HN guidelines ask that you don't complain about paywalls. It's explicitly off-topic.

Maybe its worth banning websites with paywalls?

This is like a front page advertisement.

Then it's a bad rule and we need to petition our benevolent overlord's to strike it from the charter.

Ok - but until you've done that, please follow the rules of the site.

Off-topic, but you should want to pay for news. You should want to pay a lot.

Which kind of meal would you prefer?

1) Expensive, tasty and healthy.

2) Cheap and loaded with sugar (so you come back to get more) while ads flash all around your plate and on the tip of your fork.

Same goes with cars, cosmetics, education. For some reason paying more for those goods is universally accepted. Why wouldn't people want to pay to get high quality news? "No sir, just give me the lowest quality, most clickbait news you have. Yes, I strongly prefer that to paying $10 a month."

Okay. But give me way to pay 5 cents for this article, not 12$ all you can eat. There are 200 articles per month I am willing to pay, spread along 80 magazines. How?

This is a good point, and I agree with you completely. Perhaps the Brave org will come up with a working solution. It's likely the largest problem with the Internet economy today.

Personally, for now, I'm paying monthly to those news sources that respect my attention and provide an honest representation of reality.

Then pay for the content.

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