I’d like to complain: For me, from Germany, the Paywall workarounds for WSJ do NOT work at all. This means I can’t read those articles, and have to use proxies to do so. This is not acceptable.
EDIT: One solution would be to use a link to a webcache, or screenshot, waybackmachine, or similar
When you say "This is not acceptable", what do you mean? If a link is accessible from Germany without a proxy but not the US, would that be acceptable? What if it's accessible to you in Germany and me in the US without a proxy, but not to someone in China unless they use a proxy?
So maybe it's OK to require a proxy from China? But what if a user in North Korea can't access a proxy? Should that link also be prohibited on HN? How is HN supposed to know what consists of an acceptable workaround, and what does not? Are the standards different for different countries?
It seems simpler to assume that the articles that get upvotes have people who want to read them, and that if people want to read the article everyone is raving about, they will find a way. It's Hacker News after all.
People do that in the threads, which is helpful. It's usually better not to supplant the canonical URL of a story in its link.
This problem will get a lot easier when we have a way to group the related URLs for a story. That's something we are eventually going to work on. Indeed, I wonder if it couldn't turn into a broader solution to the paywall question.
A: This is something pretty terrible and should be in violation of search engine rules. So perhaps file a complaint.
B: Even Google gets on the geo-IP bus and will outright 404 pages in some zones with zero indication that the URL was ever OK. Recent example was the Google Solar Roof thing - in some countries, it was just a 404, nothing else.
EDIT: One solution would be to use a link to a webcache, or screenshot, waybackmachine, or similar