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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety...

That's nice, I do wonder about the legitimacy of a moral statement that you have to pay to see.

For a very long time publishing something in a newspaper has been considered a way of putting something on the public record - up to and including legal obligations like announcements of deaths. The fact that newspapers cost money has never been considered a barrier to that.

One of the reasons why it was noti considered a barrier was the ability to purchase a single issue for a very reasonable price (or even read somebody else’s copy or the copy made available by the bar) vs being asked to subscribe

I shared a gift link here. You could go to your local library and look it up. What's the complaint here?

I'm not OP, but a big part of the complaint is that one can't pay 10USD to read the issue that contains the article in question... absent the charity of someone else, one must pay -at minimum- nine times that amount. [0]

Ten bucks is pretty close to "I don't even need to think about it" money. Ninety is -for most folks- nowhere near that.

[0] <https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products>

Have you checked if your local library offers you a free subscription or access? Mine does.

Publishing in a newspaper gets you distribution and a permanent record. After one day access was also virtually free.

Going behind a paywall is a reduced distribution over what an individual can easily access, and the content is no longer permanent but subject to whatever the publisher chooses to keep providing.

It’s in The Atlantic. There’ll be a copy in the Library of Congress. You’ll be able to read it for free in any dentist’s waiting room for the next six months.

> You’ll be able to read it for free in any dentist’s waiting room...

Methinks that this says quite a lot about your socioeconomic situation. I've not seen The Atlantic in a dentist's waiting room.

The Atlantic is only found in exclusive high end doctor's offices?

I don’t think I have seen a real print copy of The Atlantic in my entire life fwiw lol

It would never occur to a rich person that paying for a newspaper subscription could be considered friction, much less a problem.

I'm sure it would to a great many of them. The money would be insignificant, but there's a congnitive overhead that you had to have a subscription so that paying for it becomes thinking about that becomes friction even while the cost is insignificant. Like, hm, am I willig to just forget about it and let it charge forever so I can read this one article, do I care enough to remember I have a subscription to the site in the future, can I read the one thing and cancel on the spot, will that work? blahblah. To be sure, I'm sure some quite wealthy people could be completely unbothered by it, but I think it's far from a foregone conclusion simply by the price being insignificant for them--the subscription is a mental non-monetary transaction, you have to take at least a small mental journey of being an 'x' subscriber in a sense, and that's friction

TBF, you can access the full (text) content of The Atlantic by merely disabling javascript. It's a quality publication, with quality writing. I'm inclined to think that its tech team are also quality people ... and I'd love to think that they are happy to allow free and open access to them that have the nous to enable or disable scripts.

The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys! :-)

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