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Comment by nsriv | Hacker News Reader

This attitude towards customer-funded journalism promotes bad content and ad-driven models. It’s a valid choice. But understand the trade-offs for convenience and tracking you’re promoting.

How is he promoting tracking? The outline link has 3 cookies (0 third-party) and make 5 requests (the bad ones being Google Analytics and Doubleclick). Whereas the original article has 68 cookies (44 third party) and make 261 requests (which violates users privacy to a much greater extent).

Outline doesn’t pay the journalist. If partial paywalls fail, full paywalls à la the FT or ad-driven models must succeed. I’m okay with Archive.org links. But a private company replicating somebody else’s work without compensation nudges the world towards rich people consuming via subscription and the rest of us through tracking and ads.

The articles will always be available through websites like outline, so you'd be much better off encouraging these publishers to stop violating users privacy, stop making horrible sites that autoplay videos, automatically load new pages if scroll too far, etc. Do that and then people will be less inclined to share outline links/post content in comments, and more inclined to turn off ad blocking if doing so won't result in all sorts of nasty tracking.

Last time I saw a paywalled article, someone commented and mentioned the idea of (1) prohibiting those sites or (2) automatically redirecting to an outlined version.

Why not just tag the titles with [Paywall] so users can avoid them? Granted, they tend to be from the same sites, but it would be one less thing to remember.

I think this is the way to go. I should have clarified that in my OP.

Personally, I rather just not read paywalled articles, or I would have paid if the publication is high quality enough.

Using a workaround to circumvent the paywall seems too shady, because if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price.

> if the contents are worth reading, they should be worth paying the asking price

How about if the facts the article communicates are worth knowing, but their treatment in the article isn't worth the (digital) paper it was printed on?

I can see your argument applying to editorials, but not-so-much to raw journalism.

Presumably an important part of journalism is research.

"Presumably" is doing a lot of work in your sentence. Having worked in journalism as a reporter... most of the articles out there are rushed and sloppy. Outlets with paywalls tend to be somewhat better, but not by a lot, and even then the staff inevitably turns out to be ideologically skewed.

You realize that other sources are free to take the facts from any article they read, and write those same facts (without doing any expensive, confirmatory investigation of their own) into a new piece, without paying any sort of a license for rebroadcast of those facts, or for creating a derivative work from those facts, right?

You realize that 99% of the journalism you read, watch, or listen to every day is this kind of secondary "remixing" that deprives the original journalist-investigator of "their" reward for doing said research, right?

You realize society is perfectly okay with that, for the same reason we're okay with e.g. used book stores depriving the original author of a sale, right?

So then—having realized those things—what's the ethical argument in favor of avoiding a secondary source that happened to just plagiarize its text from the primary source, in favor of one that plagiarized its research but wrote its own paraphrase of the text? What does that get you, ethically?

(Note that I'm not trying to equivocate these things in service of making plagiarism seem less bad. The conclusion I hope you to reach here is that society is seemingly perfectly okay with certain types of plagiarism, and that that's weird and shocking and terrible and people should really be more angry about it than they are.)

I've never heard the repackaging of facts referred to as "plagiarism". That said, the only difference between plagiarism and what you discuss is that plagiarism is, generally, detectable and stealing facts is not. If it were, I'm sure there would be different rules and provisions in effect.

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