There's a growing number of posts which feature paywalls, which can be a wasted click if you're not interested in subscribing to the media. Would it be hard to provide a paywall tag or something, so we can avoid these posts if we want?
There’s a convention for this that has been established over many years:
- If it has a hard paywall the link is not allowed and should be flagged or removed by moderators (or changed to an accessible source)
- If it has a porous paywall (usually that means it can be reached via archive.ph), someone should post a link to it, and mods will pin it to the top of the thread.
The outcome is that there should never be content on HN that is inaccessible to anyone.
Sometimes it may be annoying to have to get to it via the comments and an archive link, but that’s less annoying than content that is accessible being banished from HN altogether.
Everyone knows it’s an imperfect solution, it’s just the least imperfect.
When you click on it, it'll redirect you to archive.is and search for archived versions of the page you were on, which will usually remove the paywall.
smell test says there would be legal implications for the owner of the platform if they were to feature the automation of the circumvention of something about copyrights or what's the word I'm looking for?
Just find an archive link in the comments to bypass the paywall, or post one yourself by visiting e.g. https://archive.is/ and pasting the link in the bottom box "I want to search the archive for saved snapshots".
You propose a purely technical solution. Somehow links that point to a paywall are marked as such by the system. As sometimes happens with purely technical solutions, this presents some difficulties, big or small. The main one would be knowing which links go to a paywalled site. You could have a list of them, but it would be hard to maintain it complete and up to date. Maybe there's someone out there who maintains such a list, but again it requires effort and, more importantly, it places all that effort on one single point.
There are other types of solutions that may distribute that effort more evenly on the community. Such as the one proposed by pureheartlover. Or maybe asking people that when they submit a link to a site they know is paywalled, to please include an alternate link. Maybe a suggestion in https://news.ycombinator.com/submit above the form. Or maybe readers generous with their time can comment with the alternate archive link (and maybe such comments can be pinned first).
This last one option is almost what we have now. Obviously, as most solutions that rely on the generosity of the community, it won't cover all cases and will fail sometimes to some extent -i.e. someone can still submit a paywalled link and it may not get the alternate archive link before you read it-. But, as an easy to implement and maintain solution, it's probably the best or close to it.
It's quite a tricky problem; whether or not a page is "paywalled" is not always black and white. Many sites allow X page views before the paywall appears, so visitors will have different experiences depending on whether they've interacted with the site previously. Some sites offer "gift links" that bypass the paywall, but not necessarily forever and always. Sometimes paywalls are regional based on IP address. Some sites only paywall certain stories, so if you're a subscriber to that site it's not clear whether the story you wish to link is behind a paywall for others.
With all of these qualifiers, a "paywall" tag would usually just mean "paywalled for some," and the only way to find out whether it's paywalled for you is to risk wasting that click. So it would not substantially improve the situation.
Browsing Hacker News means sometimes you'll encounter an article you aren't interested in, and paywalled articles seem to fall within that category. Nine times out of ten if you wait someone will post an archive link if it exists, that should be sufficient.
A better solution IMO would be a browser extension that highlights links to paywalled sites, since it would cover more than HN. Or you can make a frontend that would do it.
However, I am not suggesting that you bypass paywalls, as paid content is somewhat essential to how news outlets make money, I am just sharing the first google result.
I would vote for completely banning paywall posts. It annoys me no end when a post links to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times or suchlike.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/archive-page/gcaimh...