Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdcarter | Hacker News Reader

Why would you rather see blogspam than reporting from a generally reputable paper? Perhaps if you give us a reason for why you seem to detest the grey lady, you'll have a better chance of convincing others.

View on HN

The reason is because of the NYT paywall, which can be circumvented easily by googling the article and going to the NYT site, but that basically means that the link is broken for all people who read NYT regularly.

You could, you know, pay for a subscription. If you're bumping up on the limit of free articles per month, you're clearly getting some value from the paper. There are worse things than supporting good journalism!

You could also take the cheapskate's way out and open the link in incognito mode.

I don't know what the NYT was thinking when they developed such an easily circumventable paywall.

They were probably thinking about the diminishing ROI an increasingly strict and non-circumventable method would bring.

That they need google to deliver the eyeballs.

The NYT is executing a decade-long return to payment-based reporting. The early parts include easy-to-circumvent paywalls so that they can have some price discrimination [1] while also setting the social norms that payment is expected for web content. The later stages will likely include more rigid restrictions on content -- but that will only fly once "pay to read" is something people expect from expert content on the web, rather than are surprised by.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

Reply on news.ycombinator.com