There should be a ban on medium articles being published on hacker news.
I've joined HN in hope to see interesting IT content, not to be fed by big portals with general news from yet another side.
I'd rather have paywalls than widespread ads. At least it's the normal arrangement that way: you create something valuable, I pay for it. Very clear cut. With ads that relationship is blurry.
IMO most bloggers are not living by writing blogs, the blogs post are used usually for promotion or other reasons and not to make a few cents.
Newspapers are a different thing.
In that case, if their content is just self-promotion and doesn't have a lot of value, fewer people will pay.
EDIT: Really puzzled by the downvotes, care to elaborate?
Still weird that some person wants to promote some conference and fine volunteers and puts it under a paywall.
2) I can't speak for others, but paywalls have convinced me to give money to zero entities. I do subscribe to a couple, but making me delete my cookies was not their sales tactic.
3) Completely aside from all that, none of this says anything about HN, and is worth discussion. If I post a link to one of the sites I subscribe to with a larger price tag, where's the line? At what point does it damage conversation? I wonder if, on average, there's less discussion of paywalled links, or if the participant pool is different.
Just as one datapoint, I think Google News should not include WSJ links in the default feed. It is nothing but an ad, which is ironic considering the rest of news.google.com is ad-free.