> Does the average person here actually have a NYT subscription?

I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect, unless there happens to be someone on HN who has already surveyed the readership of HN to know their subscription habits.

If you are actually polling, then I'll answer that yes, I do have a subscription. Also, I have never submitted a link.

NYT is the only news outlet I subscribe to - and I'm not American, not in the US, and have never lived there. Frankly, I love their business, finance, and international coverage.

Also at $3 per month it's well worth it - and least for me.

After their ridiculous article on Scott Alexander, it's become hard to trust anything they write.

Just get yourself a case of Gellman Amnesia. Problem solved.

:P

It's trivial to bypass. I just hit the Stop button before the JavaScript finishes loading, but private tabs, reader mode, etc. should also work.

Reader mode doesn't seem to work any more on NYT articles.

It works for me in Safari.

Sometimes the trick is to tell Safari to always use reader mode for this domain, and then it kicks in before the JavaScript messes with the content

Seems to work fine on Firefox

uBlock Origin also has a "disable JavaScript" button - I simply press that and reload.

You can usually get a lot of useful and interesting information from the comments on HN submissions even if you don't or can't read the article.

Often, top level comments aren't even really about anything in the article. The article reminds the commentator of some tangent and they comment on that tangent. That top level comment and its comment subthread are in effect a separate article and its comments.

It's often these tangents that make HN comment threads worth reading.

I actually rarely read the actual article and only read comments, lol.

You may also get access through a local library (or via university). But as others mentioned, the paywall is easily avoided through blockers (no special config for ones I've used), reader mode, (or even certain links, feeds?)

archive.is is nice for seeing paywalled legacy media content

I'm not in the US, and this article isn't paywalled for me (I checked).

It seems that a large number of posts here are from the NYT. This always makes me wonder if they, and others, post on sites like this to drive up their page views.

While I'm sure plenty of sites do, a huge venue like NYT has so many readers there is bound to be HN users among them that will post anything remotely relevant. Most times I see something on a major site that I think would be worthwhile for HN, it has been posted long before I saw it.

I know there are "services" that can post your site on various social media, but I don't know how prevalent they are or if it can be easily detected.

(Opinions are my own) They don't. A site like HN isn't in the top 10,000 referrers and no one has ever heard of it; traffic from this exact post is barely a blip. There's no business value.

Teams responsible for backlinks would post on established social media in a very transparent way (from official accounts, etc.)

Besides everyone here has JS disabled, four ad blockers installed and uses a text-based browser. If I personally made the call they would never have employees (or paid contractors) post here of all places.

It's never stuck out to me as being overrepresented in posts here, but I've never thought about it either. Full disclosure: it's one of the main news sources I follow.