Hacker News Reader

Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

Killer feature. It would be awesome to have some plugin or userscript to auto-swap the e-begging scammy link for an Archive link instead.

View on HN

Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.

You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.

If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.

Is the idea that you strongly prefer seeing ads instead of paywalls?

I prefer ads because pihole blocks them. Paywalls block me, and then I have to reload and ninja enter reader mode, or if I’m reading inclined, find an archive link.

Wait, then how do you expect the journalists, sysadmins, server bills, etc. to get paid without paywalls and ads?

I think this short exchange highlights the problem really well.

Most people are uninterested in paying for those services, in part because the internet has trained them that information is free and in part because of fairly extreme polarization in opinions that seems to be everywhere.

Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good, but that information was something the news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago, reinforcing the idea that information should be free.

If there going to make money long term, they're going to have to find a new way to monetize. People are actively blocking the ads and don't want to pay for yet another subscription to content they don't access that often.

> news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago

Haven't either ads or paywalls/subscriptions always been the primary way that news companies paid for journalists/sysadmins/servers, etc? What was the funding source 'not that many years ago' if not ads or paywalls/subscriptions?

> Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good

Is arguing such a thing "well and good"? I'm not complaining, but my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from will pay their costs (as they said ads and paywalls/subscriptions were out) got downvoted - I'm not even sure that goes as far as arguing that people should help pay for content that they want to receive.

> my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from

In most cases, I am not particular about which site I read a syndicated government quote on, so "sites I want to get content from" isn't an accurate description of the use case.

The use case is more "If I search for information, and a site shows up in the results claiming to have it, but when I am baited in, the content switches to an advertisement which I cannot bypass without paying: then I do not want that site to show up in my search results anymore".

1. Doesn't that just bring us back to the questions that were explicitly raised in the parent/GP comments, such as if you don't want paywalls or subscriptions, then does that mean that you strongly prefer viewing ads (so that the servers, people, etc get paid)?

2. "read a syndicated government quote" - actually, maybe this is the more important thing - I would strongly recommend that you change your news sources so that you are not solely consuming just whatever the government says - instead, switch to news sites that actually employ (and pay) real journalists, editors, etc to not just report what the government is saying, but also to report on the majority of news that the government isn't talking about, and even if it's a topic that the government talks about, to also report what's happening on the ground, to compare government actions to historical precedents, etc etc etc. There are even sites out there that will evaluate a wide variety of news sources based on everything from right/left leaning, to reliability. If you need any help finding some, please let me know.

> "sites I want to get content from" isn't an accurate description of the use case

If I can't convince you to switch your sources to sources that employee real journalists, editors, etc (instead of simply regurgitating government claims), then I guess the accurate description for your case in particular would "sites that you want to just hear government claims repeated from"? (Although I do hope that I can convince you to switch away from your current use case.)

> going to have to find a new way to monetize

Or work on the old way. Convince Mark “Philanthropist” Zuckerberg to start an Antiadblock Foundation:

  uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270726

Right. I don’t mind paying when the value is clear and I feel like my time has been respected, and paywalled link showing up in search violates the second of those two.

In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.

This sounds a bit odd to me. When I'm hungry, I dont run to McDonald's and expect to be fed for free. I whip out my card, pay for the items, patiently wait for the food to be arrive and then eat.

You could very well argue that why are you making me wait for my food when I'm hungry.

What gives?

i think the crux here is you can’t get the food for free next door like you can get with information

The sibling reply has the right idea. Information and food are very different things, with the former spreading and duplicating every time a human comes in contact with it and often becoming readily available from a wide variety of sources.

To be clear, I have no issue paying for what I find to be quality writing, especially when it brings a novel, well thought out perspective or context. The a large majority of stuff I see turning up in search results is not this, however, especially in recent years. That category is dominated by AI-written growth hacky low info drivel.

By this logic, listings for physical products shouldn't show in search results either, because they're just ads for something you have to pay for.

You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.

This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.

Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.

I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.

I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.

Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.

I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.

It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.

As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.

Prob easier to manage a month’s worth of subscriptions than write a single paragraph of one good article (spoken as someone with a subscription allergy personally!). Darn I feel bad for journalists, almost wish physical newspapers were just about our everything so we paid a few bucks for 1-2 things and felt the products in our hands. I think that status quo was OK for the industry (or maybe journalism has never been a decent business, but seemed OK).

I would be a lot less reticent to try subscriptions if cancellation were always a standard one-click affair. It’d also help if it were the norm for companies of any kind selling subscriptions to notify you before trials, promotional periods, etc are going to end instead of keeping silent and hoping you forget.

Remembering to cancel subscriptions that I wasn’t enthused with and figuring out the mystic ritual required to cancel are types of stress I don’t need any more of.

The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.

I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.

> I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog

I don't like paywalls but this is very silly. You have exactly the same tools to evaluate products and blogs: reviews. You wanna figure out if you should pay for The Information? Go lookup a reddit thread on if it's worth it[1].

Also what "tactics"? Being indexed by a search engine? Nefarious!

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/venturecapital/comments/142ulk7/the...

I’m not likely to go on a side quest to look up reviews on a site I stumble upon in search of information. There’s a decent likelihood that the nugget I came for is either the only thing I need from the site or the site is something I’d use a small handful of times per year at most.

There’s “tactic” being used here is bait and switch.

The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.

Don't they? An ice cream maker might be highly ranked because of positive reviews from people who used it to make good ice cream, yet clicking through to the product page doesn't let me have ice cream unless I buy the machine!

Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).

Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.

(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).

Now imagine clicking through to the product page, and in order to view information about the product, you must pay first.

they are reaching out out via normal means. you don't get to redefine words because you are too cheap to pay for information and only read trash. its so funny how you idiots gibble about "if you do not pay you are the product" but everything you know about the world is you being the product

Lol, this guy thinks you pay for information.

Do you think every bit of literature that is old, has no copyright, and in the public realm is trash? I tend to think the opposite actually. Nothing that’s been written in the past 100 years is worth the paper it’s on in my opinion. Maybe you’re the one who’s PAYING to read trash?

Normal means would be paying for ads, making cold calls, etc.

You do not see ads for a new pressure washer on Google News because that is not a normal place for ads to go.

You are free to redefine whatever you want for yourself.

Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.

There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.

Exactly: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html

There is the extension Bypass Paywalls Clean[1] which fetches content from archive sites and displays it on the original page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

There's Bypass Paywalls Clean (not going to link for obvious reasons).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com