[CubsFan1060]

This feels very ethically icky to me. Folks are working hard to write these articles, and need to get paid.

If you don’t like paywalled articles just don’t read them, I don’t think it’s ethically sound to do this.

Just my $0.02

[temp_account_32]

Maybe they should sort out their pricing model. I'm not going to pay 20 different $10/month subscriptions to different papers so I can read HN and participate in the discussion.

Maybe I would pay something like a Spotify equivalent of 10-15 dollars a month to get access to all of these news websites, maybe even a limited number of articles as I don't browse them without being sent to them from another website, but nothing like that exists. So, they get zero dollars from me instead of some finite amount.

There are also some papers that I particularly enjoy and would like to support them but are just priced too prohibitively.

One of these is the Financial Times, I enjoy their writing a lot, but the digital only plan is $40/month, that's just way too much for someone who doesn't work at hedge funds or SV tech companies.

[Terretta]

> Maybe I would pay something like a Spotify equivalent of 10-15 dollars a month to get access to all of these news websites, maybe even a limited number of articles as I don't browse them without being sent to them from another website, but nothing like that exists.

It does, or did… Apple News for instance, previously Texture from Next Issue Media which rocked till acquired and even for a while after.

Unfortunately, publishers keep withdrawing from those things after they're done using the software's popularity to gain addicts. So now you have to "bring your own" subscription to the Apple News app for those publishers that withdrew. It's bizarre.

[tjpnz]

Maybe Apple should start hiring journalists.

[CubsFan1060]

All of your points are completely fine. I think it boils down to "you are too expensive so I'm not going to read your articles". This is completely fine.

I think the problem is "You are too expensive so I'll just take what I want for free". That doesn't feel like a morally defensible position. They are allowed to charge what they want. We are allowed to chose to patronize a publication or not.

I personally use Apple News for this, but of course it doesn't have everything I would like.

[nonameiguess]

Practically speaking, somewhere near zero people were going to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, but now won't because an archive link gets auto-added to a link aggregator and they don't need to go to archive.ph themselves and search for the URL, or wait two minutes for the top-voted comment to be an archive link added by a human.

[CubsFan1060]

I guess I fail to see how this makes it better?

"I'm not going to pay for it, so I should get it for free". I don't particularly see how any of that makes it more ethical.

[not1ofU]

It you're gonna get all ethical, surly you have also heard, how hard it is to get out of those subscriptions?

How about when an article gets changed (or removed), without archiving sites, how would you know?

At the end of the day, if its "actually" valuable to someone (e.g their livelyhood depends on it or something), they will probably pay for it.

[CubsFan1060]

Yup! I'm very careful about my subscriptions. But if I don't agree with the business model, I just don't consume the product. I don't see it as my place to arbitrarily dictate how others should be paid for the fruits of their labor.

Maybe better put. Someone else being unethical doesn’t absolve me of ethics, imho.

[not1ofU]

"Someone else being unethical doesn’t absolve me of ethics" - Fair point!

[anigbrowl]

Flaws with this idea:

- I don't want 100 different subscriptions. Some newspapers want you to subscribe when you visit them for the first time ever, but beyond an individual news story I have no reason to subscribe to the Tinytown Commercial Appeal & Gazette and am unlikely to ever consult it again.

- An amazing amount of paywalled articles are just reprints of wire service stories or rewrites of press releases/ court documents. I am not gonna pay you for what is already public.

- What about ads? Yes, I am willing to disable my ad blocker...if you have a reasonable ad policy. If you have more advertising than content, and it's animated or insists on getting in the way of the news outlet's user interface, you are destroying your own product. Don't come at me with 'everyone else does it so we have to as well.' Everyone else does not do it, and if you cared about what you were doing you wouldn't either.

I am a poorly paid journalist who gets by on donations, and I don't abuse my readers with ads. Would I like more money, sure. Am I willing to sell my readers time and attention for that, no. I loathe advertising as a consumer and I do not believe that the only viable business models are subscriber lock in or cognitive pollution.

[CubsFan1060]

That's fantastic! Are you saying we should force that model on every organization? Or we should not support them until they are good with that model? Or we should steal their content until they adopt your model?

[anigbrowl]

No, I'm telling you why I don't lose any sleep over circumventing paywalls. Many news outlet owners think they run an advertising company with news as the bait to bring people to the billboard. I consider this terrible for society and humanity in general, so I withhold my money. I do pay for products I consider of good quality, but much internet news is not.

[CubsFan1060]

You withhold your money and still consume the product?

[anigbrowl]

Ditch the lawyer act. You understood my plain language just fine.

[sourcecodeplz]

I agree and did not in the past. It's easy to see and judge things from just one convenient/aligned perspective...

[selcuka]

I agree that it's a grey area, but how is this different than using an ad blocker?

[Waterluvian]

I get to control what code my computer runs.

They get to decide if the site loads at all if I muck with that.

[dylan604]

or heaven forbid with disabled JS or that other heretic method of using reader mode! gasp!

[anaganisk]

A whitelist maybe that is locally stored? Probably be a good idea. But what you say is correct just life software devs in here who want to get Paid, they too want to get paid. It's strange that we often see here," allow us to pay money and don't show us ads", yet people complain about pay walls too. But, probably sharing a paywall link is not beneficial for knowledge sharing? But other than all this, it helps with deadlines at least.

[dist1ll]

Paywalled articles should be banned on HN in the first place.

The fact that they even have the slightest bit of exposure on this site is the real icky thing.

[CubsFan1060]

I disagree, but IMHO, that's a totally morally sound stance.

[kurisufag]

I don't think the average HN reader, upon encountering a paywall, is the type to reach for their wallet.

The alternate case here is that the article simply doesn't get read/discussed as much, not that the author actually receives more pay.