Hacker News Reader

If Reuters lost a click because somebody wasn’t interested enough to follow the link, sucks to be them.

If they lost the click because the article was summarised and you didn’t need to click through to read it then that’s on HN.

This is less obvious for Google news, but substantially more obvious for other search snippets (like say looking up synonyms).

View on HN

That's the whole point of aggregators-with-comment-threads like HN. We read the comments for a summary + critique of the article. Often, we skip the article because the summary in the comments is better. HN is absolutely stealing traffic from Reuters in this case.

Of course a reasonable person would argue that more people clicked through to Reuters thanks to HN, and they'd be right. I was simply playing devil's advocate, using the "logic" of the Australian draft law.

The real reason news publishers hate Google News is it makes clear that 99% of what they publish is just copied from someone else. They don't want you to view lots of news sites, they want you to go to their home page and read the copy they made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com