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Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

I kinda wish HN had a rule against submissions to sites with login walls related to news, articles, etc. Basically, content sites. It's constant these days and the only way to read the articles is via archival sites like this.

My guess is the sites don't benefit from the traffic being directed to them. The signup rate for this strategy is in the single digit percentage at most. Meanwhile, at least if you're like me, the user just immediately navigated back to HN. Out time is wasted and the "front page" of HN is being somewhat diluted by unreadable content.

View on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:

"Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."

Complaint: "This article has a paywall! Ugh!"

Solutioning: "You know, paywalls are awful. Is there any technology tweak we can apply to make the situation better?"

(Not sure if this is what you mean, but) Blocking paywalls wouldn't make HN better. It would make it much worse, because it would exclude many good articles. That's why the rule is to allow paywalls that have workarounds, i.e. that the community can still read.

If anyone has a suggestion that would actually make the situation better, I'd love to hear it, because the current situation sucks, and has sucked for at least 10 years. It just sucks less than the alternatives we know of.

Great ask. I'm not advocating for paywall blocking. Something simple like a crawler that hits a paywall on an article automatically attempts the router du jour. Or a "paywall" flag users can tag that initiates, etc.

Also please don't post complaints about complaints about paywalls. Those are off-topic twice.

Maybe a tiny lock icon? Submitter checks a box: reg/subwalled Y/N?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41000880.

There are browser extensions that let you bypass the paywall pretty easily.

I would agree with you if it weren't so easy to dodge. But it is.

Nonetheless it can be an interesting article, and if it's interesting enough people can navigate around paywalls (archive...). Otherwise I wouldn't have heard of this article and that would be sad. It's a nice read.

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