HN Stories Behind Paywalls

I've rarely seen a pay wall story end up on the front page of HN, with the exception of the occasional WSJ article - where people are quick to show how anyone can access it via Google News.

I see a lot of people complaining when NYT articles show up -- but they are often mistakenly thinking it's a paywall. It's not, it's just a free registration barrier. Even when the NYT goes metered in 2011, free members will still be allowed a certain amount of articles per month (similar to the Financial Times articles).

Moreover though, I'd like to point out that most newspapers are extremely affordable for students - almost every publication offers a generous student discount.

When I was a student I had subscriptions to the WSJ and Foreign Affairs because they were pretty cheap, WSJ was something like $15 for 3.75 months and Foreign Affairs was $20 for an entire year. NYTimes Student (M-F) is only $0.50 an issue. The Economist costs only $24 for 3.75 months... or $1.60 an issue. In almost all cases you end up saving between 70-80% when using the student subscriptions.

Plus you can keep subscribing at the same rates even after graduating -- you might have to fill in some bogus information about what course you are taking but it still works.

So, I don't know. I feel like the cost of student subscriptions isn't a whole lot and in that case maybe it's worth subscribing just to be well informed about the world. Certain pubs like the WSJ, FT, or Foreign Affairs will probably never be totally free and in that case, given the small fee they charge I'd be willing to trade eating pizza one day for ramen.

If a story becomes highly-ranked, it's almost certainly not behind a paywall, or it wouldn't become highly-ranked in the first place.

Maybe you're thinking of the NYT, where you register once for a free account (or just use a password from bugmenot.com)? Perhaps the WSJ, where the full text of everything is available from Google News?

What domains?

I read (or click through) to most everything that hits the front page and never hit paywalls, except for academic journals.

As annoying as it is to be blocked by a paywall, I don't think that's a valid criteria for censorship. Good content is good content, and often the comments on HN are worth more than the article itself.

I have the occasional problem with the NY Times, which I can usually remedy by opening the URL with a different browser. The NYT seems to require logins randomly.

I haven't noticed any paywalled stories recently, but let's roll with them existing: I'm unconcerned. Not everybody is going to get equal value out of every HN story. Our community has too diverse interests for that. This is OK. I don't read the Silicon Valley inside baseball about funding, but it is very interesting to many folks here. Similarly, scalable software marketing (email, SEO, whatever) really catches my attention and yet might be boring for folks whose main challenge is fundraising.

You're a poor college student. I sympathize: I was once a poor college student. I am no longer a poor college student. Most of us here are not poor college students. Many of us run profitable businesses. Some pay amounts which would stagger your imagination for "content" (scare quotes because I don't really like that word). Content is, ahem, not a commodity -- the existence of free "content" doesn't compete with the stuff I care about any more than the existence of free food competes with those very ritzy Chicago restaurants Thomas likes.

>> This becomes a problem when several highly-ranked stories on the HN are links to sites I assume are behind paywalls, so I simply don't click on stories with from those domains.

I think that's a bad assumption. I read the top stories quite regularly, and I haven't come across a paywall in a very long time.

1. Which are the stories that you are complaining about ?

2. The only time I have seen a similar complaint is when nytimes links are posted. But those stories are not behind a paywall. The registration is free.

A request to anyone complaining about stories on frontpage. Please post links to stories unless they are glaringly obvious (like the wave of iPad articles). I don't remember coming across any paywall. So if there are links to the stories it helps to actually understand what the OP is complaining about.

I agree, but this may become more of a problem as time goes on: apparently paywalls are coming back into vogue.

Example is the NYT apparently re-introducing paywalls in 2011, at least according to this NPR story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1227770...

Here is a blog post about the economics of the NYT paywall: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/20/the-economi...

I haven't heard about this for a while, and it looks like the posts I found are from the beginning of this year. Does anyone know if the NYT is still doing this? I hope not...

A neat little trick that may work for you is to switch your user agent to the Google bot. Since they want their site to be indexed by it, sites sometimes will allow it.

I think the best we can do is ask that when submitting a story, the submitter makes an effort to make the content as easily accessible as possible.

I have heard some complaints about this, but it tends to be on the NYT domain - which can be avoided by opening it in incognito mode.

well actually it exist quite a lot of great articles behind paywalls, and i would site obviously what is published on Harvard Business Review or similar like Rotman publications. A lot of educational and research libraries have still restricted access to their last new papers, reports and researches which usually are very useful to stay up front competitors, or find right up-to-date or future partners.