Poll: Should stories linking to paywalls indicate that?

8 points·0xbadcafebee··5 comments

You never know if the article you're about to click on is going to a paywall that's going to ask you for money to read it. Some users may prefer to skip these articles.

Should there be an indicator next to story links that show the link is going to a paywall?

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Paywalls vary depending on region, besides which people disagree about how to use that word, so such an indicator would generate a lot of disagreement.

HN's approach is that if there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

This was established a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

There will always be disagreement, but this is a very low-effort feature that brings value to users (it seems based on these small poll numbers)

It could be as simple as a single ASCII character appearing before or after the story title. You could have a checkbox on the Submit Story page that says "Paywall?" to make it appear. People could continue to check the comments for the paywall workarounds as they do today. But they could also skip articles that the submitter thought was a paywall.

Not only a link, even a filter remove all those stories with one click. Could be a cookie and if that's set, no paywall link ever again...

No, but the only reason I say no is because the mods are good about sticking archive.is links.

Is it good etiquette to link to an archived copy?

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