Just to add some facts to your speculation, and as a quick check, in the last 7 days there have been 86 submissions from the NY Times. Of those, 61 were by single submission authors. Those who have submitted more than one are:

      4 danso
      4 001sky
      3 wallflower
      3 RougeFemme
      3 rosser
      2 the_economist
      2 panarky
      2 kanamekun
      2 ibsathish

There was even one submitted by pg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6955707

Taking this into consideration, the spike may just be from the holiday lull and the fact that we are collectively reading more NYT articles and/or we are reading more of everything and submitting more of everything, but the NYT name makes the articles more readily clickable for us.

Would be interesting to dig deeper into the single submission users' user behavior too.

Btw I find it humorous that user name the_economist is one of the top NYT submitters over the last week.

Interesting. Does "single submission authors" mean: (i) they have only submitted 1 NY times article but have made other submissions or (ii) they have only ever submitted 1 article and it was a NY Times article?

It was intended to mean the former ... stand by ...

OK, done. In the last seven days, 61 people who have submitted one and only item from the NYT. For 37 of them, that was the only submission made over the past 7 days. However, the other 24 made more than one submission. The following includes the NYT submission:

    9 made 2 submissions (hence 1 other)
    5 made 3 submissions (hence 2 others)
    1 made 4 submissions (etc)
    1 made 5 submissions
    4 made 6 submissions

and then one each of 9, 10, 18, and 58 submissions.

I haven't checked the total number of submissions of those who submitted more than one NYT item. To do so would require a more sensible reporting format than just listing them.

Cool, thanks. So approximately 43% of the NYT submissions were made by members who only submitted that article. Would be interesting to know if these are new members, who perhaps created accounts for the sake of promoting NYT paywall articles...or maybe I just really want there to be a conspiracy...

Looking at how long these accounts have been registered, initial results are:

    created:  854 days ago	    created:  601 days ago
    created:  923 days ago	    created: 2466 days ago
    created:   13 days ago	    created: 1304 days ago
    created: 1311 days ago	    created: 1983 days ago
    created: 1168 days ago	    created:  500 days ago
    created:  319 days ago	    created: 1286 days ago
    created:  305 days ago	    created:  817 days ago
    created: 1793 days ago	    created: 1822 days ago
    created:   89 days ago	    created: 1444 days ago
    created:  899 days ago	    created:  491 days ago
    created:  736 days ago	    created:  649 days ago
    created: 1160 days ago	    created: 1767 days ago
    created:  363 days ago	    created:  560 days ago
    created: 1554 days ago	    created:  863 days ago
    created:   81 days ago	    created: 1169 days ago
    created: 1316 days ago	    created:  310 days ago
    created:  504 days ago	    created:  176 days ago
    created: 2015 days ago	    created:  142 days ago
    created:  838 days ago

Now complete.

So no, these don't appear to be newly registered accounts specifically for the purpose of shilling for NYT. Why do you want there to be a conspiracy?

Great detective work!...oh i don't know why I want there to be a conspiracy, maybe my own life is not exciting enough :)

In general paywalls from large, prestigious organizations scare me. For now I can ignore them, as there are hundreds of other sources of interesting content that generate revenue from traditional means (advertising, selling your information, etc.). But if the paywall scheme is successful for such organizations, others will follow suit, and the abundance of “free” quality content will dry up. The rolling snowball effect, I hope the snowball melts before it has a chance to gain momentum.

I have no trouble with the "paywall", try configuring your browser to clear cookies after a session ends (personally, I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...) or just use private browsing mode for NYT.

I used to love reading the NY Times and would still argue that it is a quality newspaper (or as good as one there is these days) but even I would have to agree that the paywall is rather annoying and articles with the paywall should be tagged as such.

Another way to view NY Times articles articles without the paywall is to drop the title into a Google search. Going through Google drops the paywall for me.

Yes, worked for me as well. Interesting, same browser, but if you click from HN versus a google search the count starts over? So you can do it 10 times before you hit the paywall again? I would think a different browser would work (different cookie), but the same browser...I wonder what this says about the NYT algorithm?

I don't like it either. It should be marked in the title. Example Title: "This is the best paywalled article you will ever see!(PAYWALL)"