If an article is from a brand-new source that uses a kind of paywall you've never encountered before, then hopefully someone will comment with a workaround. If not, you can ask. Maybe you could even subscribe to publications you like, read regularly, and want to support.
Since almost all paywalled articles are from the WSJ, the Economist, or the NYT, this shouldn't happen to you very often.
Eventually you learn these things, from living life (including reading HN for awhile). And if you can't read an article because there's no workaround, or because you don't know of a workaround:
- Just don't read the article.
- Subscribe. If you can't/won't afford it, then see above, or see below.
- Search for other sources of the information. And post them, it adds to the discussion. Most articles worth taking up space, particularly on paywalled sites, are worth that space in other venues. Almost nothing is exclusive, not after a day anyway.
In the WSJ case, I've noticed that yahoo often prints the article verbatim.
That's one option. You can also google the title or URL of the article (this is the most common workaround); or you can search the comments for the word 'paywall'; or you can purchase a membership or subscription for the paywalled site; or you can skip reading the article.
So all I need to do is try every possible option? And even then it may fail (scientific journals, newspaper archives, etc)?
The links are just huge wastes of time. A prominent tag attached to the article would be ok, but in the absence of any other feature to avoid these time sinks, it makes sense to flag the articles to save others from additional wastage.
This site has a graph that say 55% of visitors to gaming sites use adblock http://contently.com/strategist/2015/07/10/why-adblockers-sh... . I would assume hacker news visitors would have a similar number. That would be an interesting thing to measure. Someone who gets to the front page of HN should measure what percent of people with a HN referer block ads.
