Ask HN: How could HN reduce the amount of paywall articles? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How could HN reduce the amount of paywall articles?

I've been reading HN since about 2008, love it.

Though as modern media has caught up with present-day monetisation models, the paywall is rather prevalent. (Not trying to cast aspersions at paywall setups)

Just, as an Australian (insert any nation), it's hard for me to justify paying for non-my-own-nation media channels.

The archive.org links are great, but someone generally has to post as a comment, or dang (who is already too dedicated) has to manually change the url.

I don't have any great ideas, nor good ones, but the paywalls are starting to frustrate my experience.

View on HN

Why is it such a big deal to click the archive link, or use archive yourself. If the alternative is to not see the article, archive is a pretty good compromise.

A bandaid solution is for the HN commentariat to post archive.today[0] links, which somehow through some magic sauce presents the unpaywalled article. (Don't ask me how this is done, I haven't researched it, but hey, it works!).

[0] https://archive.ph/

Here's the thing, most of the worthwhile current affairs coverage comes from paywalled publications. Should we only limit ourselves to clickbait? No, of course not, not when there's alternatives.

The problem isn't HN, it's the publications. It's a problem to solve at a publication level.

Is it really a problem? Journalism costs money, and directly funding it rather than tying it to advertisers avoids some potential conflicts of interest and misalignment of incentives.

You tell me. People can either pay for access or scumbag it with a relevant link. Either their business works, or it doesn't. Either users are happy with those choices available to them or they're not. If they're not happy, take it up with the publication. It isn't HN's place to solve a publication's business model.

Comment from `crazypython' to --> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212645

I just use Bypass Paywalls[0] and Web Annoyances Ultralist (blocks cookie banners, autoplaying videos, sticky navs). https://jameslu.substack.com/p/hide-cookie-banners-paywalls-... [0]: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...

[1]: https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances

Seems like addressing this would be fairly simple to me.

Allow paywall articles to be flagged as such.

Allow users to filter out flagged articles.

That could work, but I’m not sure it will ever happen.

In this comment 'dang explains his thoughts about keeping HN a “non-siloed” site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27608856

I would imagine that reasoning extends even to paywalled articles.

I use https://12ft.io/ works great for me

Yeah...this is a good workaround but many websites have now blocked it. Sad.

I think the issue is that with effective ad blocking, they have to collect money via the paywalls in order to continue operating.

It would be nice if there was a way to do a microtransaction instead. An advanced cryptocurrency could be perfect for that.

HN could automatically link to an archive service or have a button to generate a link if they wanted. But that is kind of antagonistic to the monetization of those sites.

Pay for a subscription.

Doesn’t really help in the context of a news aggregation site…

Why not?

The number of paywalled publications linked from here could easily be over 10 or 20 or even 30. YMMV, but IMHO it wouldn’t make sense to subscribe to over 10 publications just to read an article here and there when it happens to be linked from HN.

I personally subscribe to four dailies, but most of them are regional and very unlikely to surface here.

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