I am sure you are well aware of this. What's the point of hacker news if the pages for many of the links cannot be read without subscription.
I propose some sort of moderated domain blacklist for links.
News should be free.
Paywalled pages are allowed if there is a workaround, which someone should post in the thread.
Nothing should appear on HN that isn't readable by everybody.
This has been dang's policy for at least 6 years; it's long been in the guidelines and is re-stated regularly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm not a fan of reg walls and pay walls either, but if we ban content from there, you lose a lot of sources.
I suspect it doesn't really come to a decision point while reasonable workarounds exist.
I've signed up for various online news sources before, but the experience still sucks because only 0.5% of the news links on places like HN were covered by the subscription.
They can have one or the other... I am not doing both and told them so. They're still doing it, but at least I'm not supporting it.
How do you propose news be funded?
I think this is bad faith because it’s clear OP means it should be free at point of use. I doubt they’re arguing the people who create it shouldn’t be compensated. There are many ways to do this.
Why not maintain the status quo?
Furthermore, consider that these days even the courts (which are supposed to be politically neutral) have become highly politicized. I can't think of any reason why a supposedly neutral fourth branch of government would be any better in that regard.
Where did you read this? The US postal system is not being dismantled, it’s meant to be self funded and it cannot meet its financial obligations.
> required to be funded by their Constitution.
It only empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." That’s the entire Post Office clause.
Since when are public services required to be self funded? Are the army, police or DMV self funded? And don't their obligations included obviously biased ( in favour of painting the post office as a financially ruinous institution and privatise/dismantle it) provisions for full pensions of future employees, which nobody else does, anywhere?
The US Constitution grants Congress the authority to do so if it chooses to, and historically it has chosen to. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads."
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause
I do think that the US government should ensure that you should ensure that the mail continues. I just wanted to clarify that government isn't obligated to pay for it.
If this isn’t obvious then you don’t know much about the BBC. If anything, I’d argue they spend too much time hand-wringing about listener / viewer complaints.
The system is gambled with tons of faked users. A Issue on which the journalists are reporting. It becomes economic unfeasible to do anything else then click bait journalism..
There are enough HN commentators who have subscriptions to for-pay sites such as the NYT, the WSJ, the Economist, etc., so that someone usually quotes the main points of the article in their to provide context for their comment here.
And there are enough smart and knowledgable commentators on HN that the comment thread often goes off on related matters that were not even in the article.
2. In the case of most journal articles like the one you give as an example, they are usually available for free. They just aren't free on the web. You might have to visit a library that either gets the printed journal or has something like a JSTOR subscription.
3. I'd rather be well informed even if I have to spend a little money to be so than be ignorant for free. If I see that some particular paywalled source gets regularly submitted to HN, those submissions regularly generate interesting and useful discussion, and from the comments of the people in that discussion who have access to the article I can see that it was a high quality article, that provides me with valuable information as to what paywall sources might be worth paying for.
Every time I see this topic being discussed, the general answer is that there has always existed a method to bypassing payment. Top comment (or close to the top) there will be an outline or other bypass being posted.
One could make an argument that HN should make a special link, next to the article, where the bypass link can be highlighted. The only risk is that by acknowledging this, HN could be sued for a practice that has so far been standard practice in the last several years.
Funnily I was looking recently at The Atlantic's entry on SimilarWeb, and noticed that HN is one of the top referring sites:
>news.ycombinator.com 5.75%
https://www.similarweb.com/website/theatlantic.com/#referral...
Though I don't really want to give clicks to the many many articles that are either a direct copy-paste or a trivial commentary about an actual source. Those are worse. At least the paywall is honest, giving ad revenue to a 3rd party presenting content they copy as their own is way worse.
Yes this is “optimistic” thinking for the internet. But HN can definitely do better.
I do not agree that all news should be free, but am fine with only posting free links on HN.
Other than that, HN articles are upvoted to the front page, not there naturally, and if enough people are commenting/upvoting, I think that indicated it's worth sharing despite the paywall.
And sometimes the best discussion derives from the subject in the headline without any actual relation to the article itself, and I'd hate to lose out on that discussion due to rules or automatic filtering.
I know it's frustrating, and I'm been blocked out of reading those articles on HN a daily basis, but I still prefer the status quo to one where those subjects and deriving discussions never have a chance in the first place.
Ideally (for me) the system would be something like this:
-Primary source is used with Paywall flag, and submissions under this flag decay off the front page faster unless there is engagement
-HN culture that rewards users with finding alternative free reporting
-HN culture that rewards users with providing a good high-level summary of paywalled material
Try visiting it using Tor
The example you gave is a study from a journal. Quite a difference from "news" as most would think of it (CNN, Fox, etc) which are free.
Other workarounds involve archive services, or, in the case of your example, things like this:
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/00207314211015806
Elsewhere, HN readers sometimes provide relevant extracts of paywalled articles in comments.
Anyhow, those are my thoughts. I don't like being excluded from content, but there are often ways to read it anyway.
Which is why the site rules explicitly allow paywalled content as long as a paywall workaround exists.
For academic articles, scihub gets the example article in about 2 seconds flat...
I don't see the issue.
If not anything the comments are valuable. More than once I subscribed to something based on a article I found on HN.
(also usually someone posts a non-paywalled link)
Or you can just inspect the paywall away.
Ban those journals that cut both ways in money making, but don't ban paywalled websites. Could possibly be a filter but then that's out of HN's scope. Your best option is to block them yourself (which I already do.)