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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to story content, but relevant to the linked site:

It looks like the NYTimes paywall has become more sophisticated. Simply clearing cookies and localStorage wasn't enough to open it up. I had to open the link in an incognito window before it would let me read it.

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Kills me that otherwise intelligent consumers are unwilling to pay for something as expensive to create and as high quality as the new york times. Makes me want to give up on product development altogether. Seriously -- if that's not good enough, what will be?

There's a really pernicious attitude of permissiveness, even encouragement, towards theft and evasion of payment for digital goods in many of pockets of online culture. It is disheartening.

The idea of theft of 'digital goods' is absurd.

Goods are defined as "commodities that are tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as they are produced".

Theft is defined as "the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it"

Access to New York Times articles is not a tangible commodity, and bypassing the paywall in no way deprives the New York Times company of access or of a unit of access to the article.

What's being stolen here is revenue. i.e. money.

Money is "tangible, usually movable, and generally not consumed at the same time as it is produced."

Even if by your definition this isn't stealing, you have to admit that you are in fact circumventing the way NYT is attempting to make money for their hard work. The fact is you are stealing from the people who create the content, those maintain it online, etc. Do you intend to deprive the rightful owner of this money? Probably not, but you are still doing it even if that's not your intention.

btw, not trying to single you out, specifically. It's more of a figurative "you"

I'd have no problem paying for it if it was a significant part of my life. I generally just skim the majority of the non-technical articles on HN, not paying attention to who the provider is. Apparently I've clicked and skimmed ten of these NYTimes articles in the last 17 days, which doesn't seem too unlikely given that they show up on HN fairly often.

If you're going to go all high-and-mighty about this, maybe we should be putting a [paywall] link on the HN frontpage so I can avoid clicking these articles altogether.

This would be ideal. I hate running into pay walls as well.

The NYT paywall actually excludes traffic coming from social sources like Facebook and Twitter. They don't do so for Hacker News, though (and I'm not sure about Reddit). So the general principle supports your use-case, it just isn't fine-tuned for the specific sites you use.

I think it could work but you need 2 things: niche content and an audience adding value. I'm not interested in what the NY Times has to say about sports so why would I pay for it, I'm not even remotely interested in 99 % of all of their content.

I can't tell you how many times I don't even bother reading articles. All I read is the comments on Hacker News. Not reading the articles saves me time. Reading the comments doesn't save me time but at least I'm getting a lot of value out of it.

I looked at GigaOm Pro the other day. Some of the content looks interesting and might be worth paying for. Not all of it, but even so, none of those research reports have responses / comments. The audience isn't adding value. Maybe all the value is in the research reports but I just find that hard to believe.

Yes, they patched this loophole a few days ago! And the url-bar trick doesn't work anymore!

I suspect they are re-setting cookies and localStorage onunload, but I haven't dug into it more. Tempting to write a chrome extension to open these pages in incognito mode automatically.

Even in incognito mode, you get blocked after 10 articles. You have to close/reopen to reset it, I believe.

Easily fixed though, just disable javascript for nytimes.com.

It still is somehow based on cookies and/or other client side data (rather than, e.g. looking at your IP address and timestamps as a heuristic).

When I hit the paywall in Chrome, I switched to Safari (which I rarely use, so no NYT cookies or local data there in the cache) from the same machine, and it worke OK.

Yup, the paywall has gotten stronger and will probably be getting even more upgrades. And they know all the tricks.

Once you start paying, you realize how much great content is on there. Well worth it.

I'm from Europe. I'm not sure what's behind the paywall because I think I see all the content. I never seem to go back to the site. What makes it great content to you ?

Disabling javascript will let you avoid the paywall. Disable JS, refresh page, re-enable JS works if you can't disable JS on a per-site basis.

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