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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

Articles behind a paywall are at odds with the entire experience of collaborative link sharing on an aggregator. That's why I flag them.

I'm just an ordinary user but I'll do what can to make improve the site by pushing them down in the rankings, especially given that others feel the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9329810

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Thanks for being concerned for the quality of HN! We're grateful for users like you. But please don't flag stories only because of a paywall. Accounts that repeatedly do so lose their flagging rights. You should flag stories because of content, not provenance.

The HN guidelines explicitly call for original sources. We want the best, most substantive version of a story. Other things being equal, we all prefer non-paywalled articles, but when things are not equal, substance should win. Compare the WSJ piece to the originally submitted URL in this case (it's mentioned upthread). There's no question which one belongs on HN.

When there are standard workarounds to read the content, paywalls are just an inconvenience.

The more this comes up [1], the clearer it gets that we shouldn't ban paywalls. The NYT, New Yorker, Economist, WSJ, and others are major sources. HN would be poorer without them.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Sorry, what's the workaround for reading this article? Does it cost money?

In general, you can simply Google the title of an article and following the link in Google search results will circumvent the paywall.

Google demotes links in their search results if they don't allow "first click" access to the content.

Further discussion in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941

Yeah, I tried that for this article and it didn't work. I thought there might be some other way. Thanks though.

Were you using encrypted Google, or via !g on DDG? The trick only works through the non-encrypted one.

Oh yeah, I had HTTPS-Everywhere on. Thanks a lot!

Happy to help! I myself just learned about that nuance the other day.

I'd argue that flagging paywalled pages is based on content and not provenance. If I follow a link and can't read the article then there is effectively zero content.

That's a good point and I agree. But the standard workarounds mean that the content is available. It's an annoyance to have to follow two links instead of one, or open a different window. But the cost/benefit of sacrificing good content to avoid that annoyance would be way off for HN.

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