> 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.
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.