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. ]]
Per day!
1-2 articles on the front page per day is a lot.
To answer your main question though, while I think banning wsj.com would be heavy-handed, I'd be in favor of penalizing the domain so its articles are less likely to reach the front page and stay on it for so long.
I think the reason people are having issue with it is that the topics themselves tend to be interesting, but without access to the article, participating in the discussion becomes difficult. This can be rather frustrating for people.
I know this first-hand because the incognito "trick" used to work for me, but no longer does for some reason. So I find myself effectively blocked out of the conversations.
That said, iirc, someone often helpfully posts the text of the article in such cases. Why go through the effort of banning something when either a) someone will continue to do that, or b) interest/upvotes in paywalled stories will die naturally?
The only unique pieces are usually op-eds which usually have similar articles on other popular publications as well.
"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!"
As someone else stated in these comments: "If you start an incognito window with a Google News search for the headline and can't access it, use the "Send Feedback" link at the bottom of the search page to let Google know."
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.
I stared something like this a few months ago and forgot about it. The general idea was to apply custom styling to regex matched page content. I got as far as hard coding everything I wanted in to JS file so there's no UI for it. Currently, it applies a black bar to links matching the patterns in the list but it could just as easily style it however you like. If anyone is interested, here's the JavaScript [0] and a basic manifest [1] to load it as a FF web extension (about:debugging -> Load Temporary Add-on). Edit: What it looks like with a match on HN [2]
[0] http://pastebin.com/raw/tPJXJcM5 [1] http://pastebin.com/raw/zi6UV9ZL [2] http://i.imgur.com/HQVopbQ.png
Let the vote market do its job, regulations are oppressive, don't fixate on inherent asymmetries to this decision making mechanism, etc.