Comment by hueving
10 years ago
I think you're over inflating the value of articles that a bunch of people can't read. If this policy is even half consistent, nobody will be able to complain when there are things posted that there is absolutely no workaround for other than paying (or having someone copy and repost). Postings like that absolutely deserve complaint IMO because it punishes those without privilege.
> the value of articles that a bunch of people can't read
"Paywalls with workarounds" means people can read them. Obviously we care about that—we've explicitly let everyone know that users are welcome to help each other do so.
Re value, people disagree about value judgments but someone has to make the call, and it's the same now as it has always been.
I can at least tell you what it's based on: HN wants to maximize the quality of the articles on the front page and the quality of the comments in the threads. Sites like the NYT and the New Yorker increase the former. Repetitive complaining about paywalls reduces the latter. Hence the above.
With articles like NYT taking the place of an article without a paywall (the front page has limited real estate), all you know is that NYT articles result in crappy discussions because users have difficulty reading the article and rightly complain.
Rather than banning the crappy discussion, why not ban the articles that result in it?
Because many of them are high-quality articles, and intellectual curiosity is what HN tries to optimize for.
Obviously the discussions on such articles aren't all crappy. Often they're good. That doesn't mean that off-topic generic tangents about paywalls aren't a problem. All generic tangents are a problem, and this was an increasingly common one.
It astonishes me how the people making objections in this discussion ignore that we're talking about articles that are possible for nearly everyone to read. That's what paywalls with workarounds means. It means readable with a bit of a nuisance.
There have been a few legitimate counterpoints—for example, if it's true that in some countries you can't google WSJ articles to read them, that's a problem. But mostly this argument has charged ahead as if we were talking about unreadable content, with lots of indignant points being made on that basis and little stopping to notice that it's false.
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