From their site:

> Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles. We remove the clutter so you can analyze and comment on the content. In today’s climate of widespread misinformation, Outline empowers readers to verify the facts.

A noble initiative, I think.

Perhaps, if the poster can be relied upon to follow the terms:

  You represent and warrant that you have all the rights to the Content and that none of the Content: (a) infringes, misappropriates or violates any Intellectual Property Rights;

Do you actually believe whoever posted the original link has the rights to the content? And is not infringing the Wall Street Journal's IP rights?

https://www.outline.com/terms.html

Outline is a service which bypasses WSJ's paywall. I believe it does so by imitating a web crawler. The idea is that WSJ can't paywall a crawler otherwise its SEO will be destroyed. Thus it is a reliable way to capture the information.

Thanks. Rather than just post random links to unheard of sites, it would be great if those links had a short description of what the link is.

I agree, and FYI, if you click the 'web' link which is under the article title on the comments page, if you click the first result, you will have google effectively do what outline.com does for you.

I'm confused on why this works. I see the promoted version at the top of the SERPs opens up the full article, but the first actual SERP, which is the same article shows the paywall.

Do you know why google allows WSJ et al to serve one set of content to a crawler, but another to an actual user? I thought they punished that kind of behavior.

I don't have any information that isn't public, no. Just building off of previous discussions of outline.com in HN threads.