Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatbird | Hacker News Reader

Please downvote this. A torrent of the JSTOR content shouldn't be Aaron Swartz's legacy. With JSTOR, Swartz was making a larger point; if all you have is these docs, you missed it.

View on HN

Each download isn't a copy of some files, it's a statement that Aaron's cause was the right one, even if I disagreed with his methods.

But this is the point: he made something freely available that is supposed to be freely available. The individuals publishing do publish because they want their papers to be read and cited by others. Unfortunately there is hardly an established free peer reviewing system available, so most research results are only available to a small elite. Being no student anymore, I cannot afford reading most papers because $30 to read one paper is too much. (JSTOR seems to have more easy conditions, but when you google papers you sometimes get pointed to this site and sometimes to some other site...)

The torrent isn't his legacy but rather the spirit of his activism.

You can't downvote on HN.

Yes you can. It just requires sufficient karma.

You can downvote comments, not submissions. You can only upvote and flag submissions.

Oh. Thanks, I didn't know this. Curious choice.

Recent change, after the downvote wars this past fall in which Microsoft articles would get unceremoniously downvoted to oblivion the instant they hit the front page.

The idea is that articles should rise to the top on their own merits, but not be pushed to the bottom simply by people disagreeing with their content.

But there is still the floagging. I have noticed some pro MS articles still disappearing suddenly, due to the flagging I presume.

Articles have never been downvotable, only flaggable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com