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Comment by nogabebop23 | Hacker News Reader

All of these NYT stories bring up a blocking modal dialog requiring me to log in or create an account (I guess this is a slight improvement from making me pay). Is this the same for everyone else? Why do other sites that show a dismissable overlay get raked over the coals as if they are criminals?

What value is there in posting a link on HN if it's behind a pay (or temporarily free) wall? This goes double for the WSJ. Let's not debate business models here, but asking what's the intent/requirements, and why the double standard?

View on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693084

This is a good point that Hacker News aren't generally aware of (judging by the number of comments about it, it's good to know I'm not alone). I'm not sure why it was flagged.

Disable Javascript and the modal goes away. As does most tracking and other irritations. I strongly recommend doing so for most news sites.

Hit escape as it's loading to shut down the script that blocks the screen.

There is no rule against pay walled content, and most NYT stories have numerous people complaining about it. The NYT and WSJ posts still get votes because they're large enough that many people are subscribers, and their paywalls are trivial to bypass.

The workarounds for WSJ do not work anymore for me, eg the redirect from FarceBorg will still get the "subscribe" page. Also FT. They appear to have removed workarounds. Are they STILL valid HN submissions ... even when there is NO workaround?

Or maybe there is one and i haven't twigged to it yet:-)>

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

Ah yes, "Bypass Paywalls" i do have this extension installed and have been using it for months. WSJ seems to have wizened to his workarounds, and others like the FB redirect. Eg it does not work for

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rbc-sheds-light-on-chinas-rebou...

But i will submit a request at his github site.

In the meantime, AFAIK, there is no workaround for WSJ. Is it still OK to submit them to HN? i do notice there have been few recently.

The latest release notes from seven days ago say they fix the WSJ, but there's also a commit saying that they are temporarily reverting while they wait for Mozilla to sign the update. So there seems to be a way to bypass it still, though I'm not sure what it is.

Clear your cookies

If you’re paywalled on NYT you’ve already viewed many articles.

You can clear your cookies or you might be interested in subscribing since you seem to enjoy their content.

I don't buy this, there must be some false positive rate in some of these sites. I've been told that I've viewed too many articles on sites I've never visited before.

It's happened at home too where I live alone and have not seen my IP address change in a very long time.

I was specifically talking about NYT, not other sites.

I responded the way I did because it’s a common (annoying) trope for people to complain about paywalls in one breath, then in another breath complain about ads/tracking/lack of independent journalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com