What will you do when those workarounds disappear?
What will you do when every article on the homepage is paywalled?
What will you do when users provide free mirrors, either pasted in the comments section or hosted elsewhere?
Will you be providing easy-to-use guides for users (new or otherwise) on how to effectively utilize such workarounds?
I'd like to add my voice to the calls for some kind of flair obviating that a submitted link leads to paywalled content, so that I may avoid such links.
The more these questions get into legal areas the less I can help you. YC's lawyers are charming, but moderation of this site has pretty much failed if we have to resort to asking them things.
But let me take a crack at this. No, pasting the full text of an article directly into the thread is not a good workaround. First, it gums up the thread. Second, obvious copyright issues.
Therefore, if there's a standard workaround like "incognito window", "turn cookies off", or "google the article title", the way to help people is to teach them that. If none of those things work, linking to a different way to read the content (such as a Google cache link or an archive link) is probably ok. Beyond that my crystal ball gets cloudy.
The workarounds are arguably a circumvention of DRM. Sites that have paywalls have chosen not to participate in social news type engagements (unless they make specific exemptions for sites like this, rendering this whole discussion unnecessary), and it seems appropriate to honor their intentions.
Is it though? They are allowing use if you have a Google refer, the "circumvention" is just linking to a Google search endpoint that redirects you to their website. You entered in the prescribed way which they made an explicit method for.
> What will you do when every article on the homepage is paywalled?
We'll all do whatever the overall population of the web ends up doing, should this come to pass. Which will be some combination of: subscribe, subscribe to an aggregated subscription (like cable TV), or don't read it.
Legal workarounds, as far as I know. The only reason the Google trick works is because the sites allow it. Note that they don't allow it directly from HN, the point being they control it, not Google.
Cookies and private windows only work because the sites have a free views counter. They could stop at zero if they wanted.
I can't see the HN mods advocating anything illegal.
If every article on the homepage was paywalled, it would because the balance had tipped in sites' favor, and they no longer feel compelled to allow workarounds. Almost everyone that you might think could charge for their service would be charging, the result being every/most articles on HN's homepage paywalled.
In that future, people would commonly subscribe to news sites. I can imaging that aggregating subscriptions services would come to be, something like cable, where you pay one low-ish price and have access to lots of sites, without having to manage individual subscriptions.
And now that I think about that more, that could end up replacing what cable is now, and the giant broadband companies would either become the dumb pipes that they truly are, or become those subscription aggregators.
What will you do when every article on the homepage is paywalled?
What will you do when users provide free mirrors, either pasted in the comments section or hosted elsewhere?
Will you be providing easy-to-use guides for users (new or otherwise) on how to effectively utilize such workarounds?
I'd like to add my voice to the calls for some kind of flair obviating that a submitted link leads to paywalled content, so that I may avoid such links.