Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News

Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by karma20 on Thursday August 08, 2019 @02:43PM (#20647327)

HN's policy on paywalls is outlined in the FAQ [1]. Private Browsing mode is generally a good workaround:

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

The rationale explained by dang in a 2015 post [2] makes sense:

> Publications like NYT, WSJ, the Economist, and the New Yorker have paywalls that leave ways for readers to work around them. Such stories are OK to post to Hacker News. Yes, this sucks, but the loss of many substantive articles would suck worse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by arcboii92 on Thursday August 08, 2019 @05:29PM (#20648996)

Aside from: clearing cookies, having to reopen news articles you've already half read in incognito, or adding an additional '.' (like "nytimes.com./blah"); what are some of the other ways people are getting around paywalls?

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by deftnerd on Friday August 09, 2019 @11:47PM (#20660019)

Personally, I do just clear cookies, but I've found a good Firefox extension that does it well for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-cookie...

It has a convenient button that clears all the storage for the page in the current window. It remove the cookies, local storage and session storage. Then I just reload the pay-walled page and it thinks I'm a new visitor.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by n4r9 on Thursday August 08, 2019 @05:32PM (#20649023)

Adding "outline.com/" before the url sometimes works.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by lowdose on Thursday August 08, 2019 @07:38PM (#20650048)

At least wsj.com does not work anymore on outline. Maybe HN can bundle all those paywalled sites and sell a subscription.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by sturgill on Thursday August 08, 2019 @08:14PM (#20650226)

Use a WSJ link from Bitly into Outline and it works again...

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by enlyth on Thursday August 08, 2019 @08:49PM (#20650383)

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

There's a Chrome equivalent as well

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by AdamJacobMuller on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:32PM (#20650594)

archive.is is fairly foolproof for me

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by allthing on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:06PM (#20650470)

I have this trick where I just pay for high quality, well researched news because I'm an adult and I realize that not everything should be free and maybe we should pay for some things.

People on HN like to complain about paying in data to use Google and Facebook and yet also consider it an affront that they have to pay money to journalists.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by Xelbair on Friday August 09, 2019 @05:10AM (#20652560)

True, i would agree.

If only paying for high quality news and articles guaranteed me that i won't see ads, well at least non-js ads.

Sadly that won't happen because people who can pay for such news have higher disposable income and are better target for advertisers.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by krageon on Friday August 09, 2019 @04:57AM (#20652458)

Which one do you pay for? All of them? How do you determine high quality? How do you reconcile the fact that you need to pay before you can read it, thus not being able to evaluate the quality properly? How do you reconcile saying a large news publication produces quality with the amount of errors that are frequently and egregiously present in articles with any sort of depth?

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by tofflos on Friday August 09, 2019 @06:09AM (#20652882)

I agree with the opening question but I find latter part of the argument unreasonable. You will encounter many, many services in life that require an initial payment. Pay once and then decide whether you want to keep on paying for more. This applies to restaurants, movies, hotels, taxis, etc. The initial payment for pay-walled articles is usually quite small. If you don't know where to start you can always ask a friend, read a review, or join an online community.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by krageon on Monday August 12, 2019 @04:12AM (#20673490)

I opened and closed with the questions what were to me most relevant, which is my mistake as I should have front-loaded both. Your answer is reasonable, except it glosses over the fact that the quality is bad and this is a pervasive issue.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are pay-walled articles allowed on Hacker News by cryptozeus on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:28PM (#20650565)

Yup this

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