https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109987
This time the comments seem to be mostly positive.
Responding to specific criticism from your comments:
> It does feel excessive or cynical or something to install an actual app to work around a paywall. The WSJ organization says, you must pay us $28.99 a month for full access to this content. That's the value they've placed on their content, that's the price they are charging, and that's what people should pay.
> The fact that they also make most if not all of the content available on a "complimentary" basis via Google suggests that they do value occasional visits from non-subscribers.
> However if millions of non-subscribers were to install a paywall avoidance app and access the full content on a daily basis, this would probably violate the spirit of "occasional".
WSJ certainly deserves to set whatever price on their work that they wish, and they also deserved to be compensated according to the value of that work.
However, if the workaround is no more in violation of the "spirit of occasional [visits]" than this publisher practice is in violation of the "spirit" of web navigation. That spirit is that users should not be discriminated against based on their navigation source.
Google search results should not be a representation of content that is not allowed to direct visitors. If WSJ wants to represent to Googlebot and Google visitors that the content is open, then it should be open to direct visitors as well.
If I, a user, did nothing special to access the content, I should be able to pass on the link to a new set of users. This practice breaks that, and, I imagine almost invariably, users will not understand why.
Don't you think we should also have the option to decide not to pay using these "dirty" tricks of the trade?
Personally, I don't think it's fair that WSJ simultaneously demands money for content but leaves open a loophole so they can get Google exposure, and then complain when people use said exposure. It smacks of wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
The entire point of the Google link and the whole paywall circumvention is so they can get traffic to their site, right? This implies that getting people on their site is more valuable to them than locking their content behind a paywall.
They could always serve only a summary to both Google and to nonsubscribers from other referrers, but this leads to people mentally filing them in the "useless link, never click" bucket along with Experts Exchange and other crappy content farms.
In my opinion, this tactic is no different than offering it for free but then demanding payment anyway.
But that's indeed a really odd set of comments. While there is some criticism on this thread here, it's way more down to Earth, nobody is talking about theft or anything.
Is there a name for ethical notions related to whether people make a habit of something, or whether people help make something convenient?
I feel that discriminating based on referrer is wrong. Or IP address. Or geographic location. Or user agent.
More than that, discriminating based on those things is really flimsy.
A website should provide the same content regardless of what browser you're using or where you're coming from.
I don't see the plugin as getting around their paywall. I see it as getting around moronic web development.
For example, if a site has unbelievably intrusive advertising and I install an ad blocker. Or a site pops up a register for our newsletter modal and it's blocking the content and there's no way to close it ... so I open up the console and remove the dom node entirely so I can see the article.
In other words, stupid shit that 99.9% of people don't know how to get around, but a web developer can get around in a few seconds.
That's not hacking or bypassing anything, that's just moronic web development.
If you want to put up a paywall, that's fine. A wall is a wall. If you make a hole in the wall on purpose and people walk through that hole, don't blame the people ... blame the wall.
Would you prefer it instead if WSJ.com just removed themselves from Google? And applied the paywall to everyone? I don't see how that's better. Or is the complaint that any paywall exists anywhere?
That really misrepresents the case. Its not a difference in traffic costs, its a difference in whether the edge provider is willing to send its content over the network to you. And they are willing to do so if you are paying them directly, or you are sent by someone who is paying them with a certain quantity of exposure.
While you could probably formulate a single principle that would support both what you are calling for here and net neutrality, it probably would be a controversial principle even among people who support net neutrality, and wouldn't represent what many people who do support net neutrality support. Claiming that if someone doesn't agree with you on this they must oppose net neutrality is simply wrong, and unhelpful to either your cause of net neutrality.
Net neutrality is about the service provider not getting involved in what the service carries.
A content owner can freely decide who can/cant view their content, that's completely up to them. Same way we have regional rights for video content.
Just because we want it to be equal doesn't take their rights away, regardless of consumer perception, etc.
The content is the same, it's the business model of the publisher that's different: ads vs subscription.
Google is just serving as an index, you can't read it on Google itself so why should they be able to discriminate content providers based on business model?
It's actually free. At least the first paragraph or so is. And a lot of the personal finance articles are totally free. About 99% of the time that's good enough for me.
So I don't bypass the paywall. I go to WSJ on a daily basis and simply read the free intro text.
I enjoy the WSJ enough that I would gladly pay them, except they play the usual pricing games, which I detest. I wish they just gave me their "best" price, and never tried to jack up that price to whatever they thought they could get away with at renewal. On a few occasions I've had a 1 year subscription for IIRC perhaps $99 but at renewal they tried to jack up the price substantially.
They've been playing these pricing games on and off for at least 10 years, if not longer. I have been willing to pay them at least $1,000 over that time. Instead they've gotten at most $200. But they're not alone in this. Most newspapers and magazines follow that pricing model.
OTOH the NY Times is great. I always clear cookies and browse w/o Javascript and I can read all the articles for free. This is a deliberate decision on their part. Still, I probably don't spend more than a few minutes a day on their site, so it's not like they could get $100/yr from me.
For a while, the NY Times was hilariously free. News articles were free, while they charged for their "editorial" content. That was perhaps a good idea for their core NYC demographic, but for other people (like me) the opposite would have been more attractive. How much would it cost me to keep from ever even seeing a headline for anything written by Maureen Dowd? Alas, that pricing model has long since changed.
1) Many people are ethically opposed to circumventing paywalls.
2) Many people are ethically opposed to paywalls treating certain traffic as special or different.
As Jeremy says below: "What's not so great is creating an internet where if you use our Trusted Corporate Partner™ you're allowed to view a public webpage, and if you come from anywhere less privileged on the internet, you're not. That's not sustainable. Lest we fall into a vortex where you're only allowed to browse the public web by logging in through Facebook. I wouldn't want to be online in that world."
I agree. I think the difference in responses from HN commenters is about which ethical evaluation people are focusing on, #1 or #2 above.
Sorry habosa. You're not popular enough to do disruptive things.