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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

Can we please ban paid sites links? It's extremely annoying. And encouraging piracy by putting a link into the comments that circumvents it is even worse.

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This question has been settled for years on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989. 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...

It's not a perfect or even particularly good solution but it's much better than banning all the sites with soft paywalls or any other solution I'm aware of.

No.

Also I'm not quite okay with asking a 3rd party to spend resources on something what could be not even used.

Also there is archive.ph link in a comment made 45 minutes before your comment.

So instead of respecting the creators of the content you are linking to an unpaid link, essentially encouraging piracy? And then you want to lecture me on asking something of someone? Please...

I think paywalled links are reasonable since one should be able to ask for money for their work/efforts, though it would be helpful to disclose the fact somehow, to save a click for those uninterested in that media format?

For example, we already have suggestions for videos and PDFs in the guidelines:

  > If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.

Of course, I'm not sure what a name for that tag might be, [paid link] or [paywall], though those might have negative connotations. Just a thought.

Edit: dang also linked the FAQ and previous discussion of paywalls above, it seems a solved question.

What is so bad about piracy. I like piracy. Even with my content of it prevents me from maling content I will stop making it.

I love piracy. Thankfully, it’s existence doesn’t depend on whether you like it or not.

For what it's worth, the article seems free to access on mobile here in Australia. I'm using an Android phone with the Vivaldi browser. Each article prompts with an offer to subscribe to the NYT for $20/year or 50c/week, but that prompt is easily dismissed. I also have the free New York Times login account that increases the number of free articles you're allowed to read, but apparently I wasn't logged in to that anyway.

Perhaps I have paywall free access because I took their "Not ready to subscribe? Tell us why" survey a while back?

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