On: Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall...

[michaelt]

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.

[jsprogrammer → michaelt]

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.

[DanBC → jsprogrammer]

The links are a waste of time to you. Other people have useful subscriptions or know the work-arounds and those links are useful to them.

Of the flood of links posted to /newest the paywalled links are nowhere near the most problematic.

[jsprogrammer → DanBC]

I'm curious what people think are the most problematic links?

[hueving → michaelt]

Or we can stop showing paywalled links to people and not support this crap as a community.

[guipsp → hueving]

It's either this or ads, and ads don't work anymore because people use adblock.

[hueving → guipsp]

Most people don't use adblock and the ones that do weren't clicking on ads to start with.

[Buge → hueving]

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.

And many ads are paid per view, not per click.