HN practice of circumventing paywall on news sites

4 pointsposted 19 hours ago
by edavison1

Item id: 44448099

5 Comments

A_D_E_P_T

19 hours ago

Serious question: Do you think that news sites aren't aware of archive.today?

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.

edavison1

19 hours ago

I'm sure they are, but I don't see how it relates to my question. Like, you wouldn't see anyone posting links to download a movie, or an app, that would otherwise require people to pay. So why is the practice so common to links here? I mean, shouldn't HN users pay for the journalism they're so eager to discuss?

gkbrk

19 hours ago

Here, have a link to Spider-Man.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:8148C169C4B84048FCF8D44AAF275F82BC33829E

walterbell

19 hours ago

Enablement of archive links is a decentralized decision made by content owners.

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.

edavison1

19 hours ago

Thanks, I think this answers my question, appreciate it