Ask HN: Are pay-walled posts essentially a form of advertising?

3 pointsdynamite-ready2 comments

In order to foster a real discussion about an article behind a paywall, all participants would be required to pay for access and read it, right? I've only found this to be a real problem in the past 2 years. Reddit is particularly susceptible, but it's becoming more and more prevalent.

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That's why some allow you "max 3 articles" or so. That can be circumvented with incognito mode.

But at some level it's a donation. Spotify is a donation. Sublime Text is a donation. All of us can spare $5/month for something of value. It's just a kind of forced donation.

> all participants would be required to pay for access and read it

Assuming the paywall can't be bypassed. The problem is that publishers want to have the cake and eat it too, so they happily let search engine/social media bots get access to the content (based on the user-agent) which means we can use this opportunity to bypass it.

At present, paywalls are simply an inconvenience.

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