I'm a subscriber to and weekly reader of the Economist and I am more than happy to pay for the quality of reporting that I receive. That said, I wish there was some way that HN could indicate (on the article link on site's feed) that content is paywalled.

just keep hitting ESC immediately after opening the link. it kills the javascript on the page :)

It's worse than that. The article is loaded in full and then is truncated via js.

You'd guess that's EXACTLY the kind of shitty behavior that google claims to flag/penalize the website.. but.. here's a google-golf hit for the article:

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+search+for+extraterrestr...

Surely.. only the "excerpt" is served to google right? Nope... click though the cached copy. The article is indexed in full.

Right.

I have nothing against linking paywalled resources, but that's scummy behavior.

Skipped.

It's indexed because, as you say, it's transmited completely. So maybe just disabling js it's readable. I have economist.com disabled in uBlock Origin (it works), but I guess that disabling all js would work too?

Because of that, I think not taking measures against this behaviour is the lesser evil.

(edit: small potatoes)

What’d scummy about being easy to defeat? Or do you mean google?

It's not about being easy to defeat.

It's scummy on the economist's side from a SEO perspective which I absolutely hate in all media outlets that do this.

If the full article is allowed to be indexed by a search engine, the expectation is to be able to get the _same_ result as the search engine is seeing when you click through.

This is clearly a cheap way to rank higher in search results. If you don't want non-paying users to read, then the same excerpt should be shown to the search engine.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox solves these annoyances.