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Comment by netman21 | Hacker News Reader

I wish HN would just ban links to paywalled sites altogether. I am so frustrated I no longer read NYT, WashPost, the frigg'n LA Times, even my local newspaper. The content web is seriously broken. Even Medium is paywalled now. I hope Wired stays open. Otherwise we will be down to BBC, NPR, and TV News sites, which are so plastered with ads you have to grit your teeth before clicking on a link.

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I’m not sure why this is downvoted. It’s not straight up complaining about pay walled articles.

Proposing a solution (ban then from HN) is worth considering. If most HNers can’t read enough of an article to discuss it with some degree of depth, what is the point of allowing them here?

You can always try the extensions available to open those paywalls.

I've considered a service which I sent a link to, and retrieves the text and saves it for later reading or something of sorts

Serious question - how do you expect news sites to deliver their content without you either paying them directly or them showing you ads?

I think it's reasonable to ask with respect to HN policy. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion when only a small percentage of the people on HN can read the full article.

What percentage of HN visitors do you think can read the full text of this article? 1% seems like a high estimate.

I beg to differ. HN’ers can always find something so abstracted from the article to debate about. This thread now, “Should news sites have paywalls?” “Should we ban pay walled news sources from HN?”. HN’ers are always down for a good debate!

No the parent, but... I think there's nothing wrong with paywalls. But this is not an ordinary one: I can't even pay, because their overpriced subscription is not available in my country.

I wouldn't mind paying if that meant i was free from all forms of tracking, selling my data, and ads.

Which isn't the case as folks paying for such services are the most valuable to advertisers.

It should at least be flagged in the title as paywalled, to save me the time clicking/half reading before giving up at the wall

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