Ask HN: The WSJ paywall workaround no longer works. Why are their links allowed?

2) If the article gets upvotes, then enough people have subscriptions (or workarounds) to warrant a discussion. Let the votes do their job.

If you really don't want to see WSJ articles, install/make a browser extension that does it for you.

Voting doesn't work if people are disenfranchised. 20% of HN discussing an article the other 80% can't read will be the end of HN. Maybe if this was a sub-reddit "community" where access to the WSJ was assumed, but HN is a general and open discussion board.

(Also, when politics or people like Taleb Nissam or Paul Krugman are discussed, the voting isn't very informative.)

There are _plenty_ of discussions to participate in here. WSJ make up maybe 1-2 articles on the front page per day? Can someone explain why this matters enough to even consider a banning of content?

For those who don't want to see it: upvote other things!

I'd much rather see a surge in voting non-mainstream media content then for HN to enforce banning. Come on people, we can be better!

[[As a personal aside, I typically don't upvote and rarely read discussions about mainstream press (WSJ, NY times, WashPost,Economist) here. ]]

"Oh look! Direct hits from google have gone up 300% (or have been hit XX times) in the last 2 minutes... turn on the sliding 5 minute paywall!"

The only unique pieces are usually op-eds which usually have similar articles on other popular publications as well.

While I know it is unlikely, I wonder if WSJ has figured out a counter-trick.

Many people may see the headline and upvote it so it attracts some discussion in the comments.

Workarounds help, but if they aren't available (or not working any longer), the content isn't accessible for a lot of the international HN community. So, in this case I'd personally prefer another (non-paywalled) source for the topic or just no HN entry at all if no alternative is available.

It makes little sense to ban discussions among the set of users who can and are willing to read the content.

There is no rule that people have to comment on articles they can't read. Seems backwards to forbid interested people from linking to and discussing an article in earnest just to reduce posting from bullshitters.

It's just paywalls as a particular implementation of monetizing news that I'm opposed to.

I'd say the same applies if it isn't optional. They just go somewhere else, mostly.

I agree with OP.

IMO it's not a big deal though, as I've turned to Bloomberg for most of my market news. My health has also improved considering that I no longer subject myself to skimming through the WSJ comments section.

A couple of things I wonder: A) maybe is a rolling change, and not yet complete; or B) perhaps the goal is to disrupt it enough to make it not reliable, yet functional enough for plausible deniability.

The end result though, is that I read less of the WSJ. I'm sympathetic to the need for paying subscribers, but I've already subb'ed to the NYT, so if I run into unavoidable paywalls at other sources, the end result is that I'll read less of those sources.

It works sometimes, but other times it won't work even with a Google Search referrer in an incognito tab.

Hacker news is a forum for discussing topics. How can you possible discuss an article you can't read? You can, however, discuss a piece of software based on it's intended purpose.

My frustration with hard-core paywall sites is that most of the community is blocked (or has to jump through hoops) to read the content.