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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

Here's the announcement from one of the principal engineers:

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/05/direct-file-on-github/

Thanks - I've changed the URL to that from https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filin... above, since the latter continues to be signup-walled.

If anybody wants to read the 404 article - https://archive.is/U6j4b

You could also just sign up and read it on their site, and consider subscribing.

Journalism is labor

The ad model won.

I'd agree typically but paywalling open source government software just to talk about it is wild behavior.

how is the software being paywalled here?

They're talking about it but to actually see the thing they're talking about you have to pay before the part of the article that links to it is clickable

or you can just google it? it's not like the source code is exclusively held by 404media and you must pay them to view it, or something. would you have the same opinion if e.g. the article was the same but just didn't link to the repo?

If you want indie publications to survive, please reconsider punishing sites that are sign-up walled.

If they intend for a mass market to read their articles, indie publications should find a way to sell a user an article for a fair price. Especially in the context of coming from a news aggregator site, it's absurd that I'm going to buy a recurring subscription for Tax Software Quarterly, Yacht Week, Greg's TV Reviews etc. The number of distinct domains I click through to from HN alone would be hundreds of dollars a month if I'm starting subscriptions for each one.

I hate and block ads, since they literally screw up the functioning of the page now, so I don't think they should "just have ads and be open" -- but I think expecting average non-journalists to sign up for subscriptions to multiple "national newspapers" and a half dozen news magazines is absurd, which is why people here don't like paywalls, and bypass them wherever possible.

if someone is unwilling to pay for access to an entire collection of articles, i'd find it very unlikely that they pay for a single article. unless it's an outrageously low price like 10 cents or something

Well, it certainly should be well under a buck -- I refuse to believe they're earning more than 25 cents per visitor from the circus of bullshit sticky autoplaying video ads festooning the pages anyway. I'd just click "Pay 49 cents" if they had Apple Pay or another 1-click option that doesn't share my information with them, AND it meant zero ads. Of course even the paywalled sites that sell subscriptions mostly don't turn off their ads, so I assume they'd like to double-dip.

I think the video streaming services are a good model to follow. You go on Prime Video and see videos from several decades, dozens of cable & broadcast networks, and hundreds or thousands of distributors and production companies. The rights are a mess, but that's all hidden from view. Now if only text-based media could operate like that...

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