Hacker News Reader

Comment by kova12 | Hacker News Reader

article is behind paywall

Just disable JS on the page.

Good advice for almost all pages.

Seems like an unusually large percentage of posts on Hacker News are behind paywalls, some soft, some hard, some with a maximum free articles per time-unit. I peruse most of the top stories daily and can't read a good number of them making me have to just read the comments to get a sense of the article. It is seriously annoying. I wish there was some kind of flair or warning on these posts.

You can block JavaScript on a site basis and read it. There might be some multimedia you sometimes miss but its good if you just want to read the text.

I think HN should have a rule that if someone puts up a link that is behind a paywall, they should give some way to get around it. Like they should make the first comment a set of instructions, like disable JS or an alternative link.

Or you could just ignore things you aren’t willing to pay for, instead of expecting to be able to steal them.

The problem with that is I would have to subscribe to a hundred different publications, and a new one every few days.

If I could buy a subscription that covered all online publications, and for a reasonable price, I would be quite happy. As it is I already have 5 print subscriptions.

archive.fo You're welcome.

I'm with you.

Mods currate the front page, so everything I read here seems like an advertisement.

We curate the front page for interestingness (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Advertisement has nothing to do with it. If there's a class of articles you're seeing here consistently that you don't think gratifies intellectual curiosity, I'd like to know what they are. Usually the trouble is that users don't all share the same curiosity, but it's possible that we need to make a change somehow.

We also try to make sure that hard-paywalled articles don't appear on the front page, though that's gotten complicated because those publications work differently for different users.

Thanks, keep up the good work.

I agree with the other user that mentioned it would be nice to have some indication of hard or soft blocks. I realize that wouldn't be easy, especially to be completely accurate with, but even if it was done for a subset of sites that often appear it would be a nice feature.

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