If you flag stories for that reason you'll eventually lose your flagging rights. HN's policy is: paywalls with workarounds are ok, users can supply workarounds in the threads, but complaints about paywalls and paywall policies are off topic.
The paywalls suck, of course, but banning NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and all other such publications would suck worse. I realize not everyone agrees with this, but it seems the right call to me, which doesn't mean I like it any more than you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date... if anyone wants to read it.
Spoofing the referer header to a google search also has this effect, and I think that's what the bypass extension I linked does.
Bypassed the paywall for me on Firefox.
To quote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989998
> If you prepend "facebook.com/l.php?u=" to a wsj link, it will let you read the full article. Like so:
> http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how...
I'm not sure what the appropriate response is to that on HN. I'd probably downvote if I could downvote submissions, but flagging seems unduly harsh.
I found a Chrome extension to bypass the paywall: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock