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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Quick question for you: has there been any significant change in how HN handles the New York Times after 2019 specifically?

Looking over my front page archive, that's one of the first big site-related shifts I've noticed, and it's quiet pronounced:

   216   Year: 2007
   333   Year: 2008
   270   Year: 2009
   202   Year: 2010
   168   Year: 2011
   184   Year: 2012
   191   Year: 2013
   271   Year: 2014
   289   Year: 2015
   362   Year: 2016
   343   Year: 2017
   396   Year: 2018
   326   Year: 2019
    83   Year: 2020
    64   Year: 2021
    67   Year: 2022
    37   Year: 2023

I've not gone through to look at other domains specifically, but NYT typically shows up in the top 3--4 sites through 2019, then falls to #7 in 2020, #9 in 2021, and recovers to #5 in 2022.

That's a pretty big movement as these things go.

View on HN

Interesting. They had a major refactor of their paywall in August 2019. Maybe that turns people off to posting content that isn’t unique to the NYT. Or maybe paywalled articles are less likely to make the HN front page (?).

https://open.nytimes.com/we-re-launched-the-new-york-times-p...

Drilling in on my data by month, it looks as if July or August, 2019, was the switch-over, with another big hit in Dec 2019 / Jan 2020:

   2018-1 *************************************************************************
   2018-2 ************************************************************
   2018-3 **********************************************
   2018-4 *********************************************************************
   2018-5 ***********************************************************************
   2018-6 *******************************************************************
   2018-7 ****************************************
   2018-8 ********************************************
   2018-9 ****************************************************************
  2018-10 *************************************************
  2018-11 *****************************************************
  2018-12 ****************************************************************
   2019-1 ************************************************
   2019-2 *************************************************
   2019-3 ************************************************
   2019-4 *******************************************************************
   2019-5 *******************************************************************
   2019-6 *****************************************************************
   2019-7 ******************************
   2019-8 ******************************************
   2019-9 ************************************************
  2019-10 ********************************************
  2019-11 ***********************************
  2019-12 ********************************
   2020-1 ************
   2020-2 ************
   2020-3 *****************
   2020-4 ************
   2020-5 *******
   2020-6 *******
   2020-7 ************
   2020-8 ************
   2020-9 *******
  2020-10 *******************
  2020-11 ********
  2020-12 *****************

(July seems to be an annual slump in HN -- NYT submissions for some reason, which confounds analysis somewhat.)

(Apologies to mobile readers ;-)

I for one won't upvote a paywalled article.

That's one hypothesis I'm considering.

It'd be interesting to, say, look at a number of sites which have gone paywall and see how that impact on HN front-page posts.

Off the top of my head, some of those would be:

- NYTimes

- WSJ

- Quora

- WaPo

- LA Times

If anyone has a handy list, especially with dates, I'd appreciate it.

Here's the top 40 "general news" sites with barplots by year. I know that NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, telegraph.co.uk, and possibly a few others have paywalls and may have implemented them over this period. Pastebin to spare readers here another monster text post, expires in a month:

<https://pastebin.com/raw/nmNXyE8G>

Paywall dates:

- NY Times: ~August 2019

- BBC: none

- The Guardian: none

- Washington Post: June 2013. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5829206> HN traffic actually rose. Tightened markedly in 2018: <https://web.archive.org/web/20171213135245/https://reason.co...>

- Reuters: April 2021 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053>

- NPR: none

- CNN: none

- Slate: 2015 (International readers) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9821492>

- Vice: none?

- LA TImes: Paywalled, 2012. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/la-times-paywall_n_1299997>

- CNet: none

- Yahoo: none

- SFGate: 2015 <https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/2sj78h/death_spira...>

- cbc.ca: none

- CNBC: none

- guardian.co.uk: none

- vox.com: none (though discussed)

- salon.com: none?

Mixed bag on impacts, though I suspect paywalls going up or tightening has a lot to do with FP story trends.

Reading the replies by philshem and others, I think it has to have been the paywall change.

Thanks, and appreciated.

Paywalls certainly seem associated with a few declines (NYT, WaPo), but not others. E.g., NPR and CBC.ca both fell off a cliff in 2022, PBS fell after 2008. None impose paywalls.

Might be a pattern there, could just be noise.

According to the New York Times, no one noticed: https://open.nytimes.com/we-re-launched-the-new-york-times-p...

That cut looks a lot like a consequence of changing approaches to monetarization.

Probably it's just a typo, but I'd like to point out that "monetarization" is the process of turns something into a currency, whereas I think you're referring to "monetization" which refers to making something generate revenue(, or to make a painting beautiful by using the wrong colours and lots of blur).

Thanks, not a typo, never occurred to me that the two character sequences are almost as different as the two concepts. I guess I'll invoke "they rarely occur in the same context" as my excuse, and how passive use gets by just fine without looking at the letters all that closely.

We're in the Monet!

Het Nymphéas -bekken - Claude Monet - Valuta van 50 euro of - 1/4 oz Be - 2022

https://www.pieces-et-monnaies.com/nl-nl/products/le-bassin-...

To be fair, what the NYT is claiming is that there were no technical glitches during the rollout.

People did notice paywalls going up.

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