HN practice of circumventing paywall on news sites
4 edavison1 5 7/2/2025, 7:54:51 PM
Why is this practice allowed? Seems like every article that gets posted here has a link leading people to a non-paywalled version of the article. Does this not violate one of the rules of HN? Or I guess I'm asking, shouldn't it?
In the guidelines it specifically says "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds." This feels weird to me because it's encouraging piracy/unauthorized viewing of paywalled content. Particularly in an age where media businesses are struggling to compete and many have instituted paywalls in order to financially support quality journalism, why is it the policy of this website to tacitly allow users to get free access?
They allow their paywalls to be bypassed. (There are a few that don't, but most are permissive.) You might want to consider why this is the case.
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Shouldn't HN respect the distribution decisions of content owners? The primary link on an HN story is always the paywalled link, which offers search engine benefits to the target.
There's a long history of multi-channel distribution policy and variations in priced and non-priced benefits to content owners, from the first days of print to the ever-evolving online economy of paywalls, traffic brokers, ad brokers, content scraping and surveillance capitalism.