Ask HN: "Marking" Paywalled Articles Posted on HN
I do not like wasting two clicks on articles that sound interesting but I cannot read because they are behind a paywall.
What do my fellow HN users think? Should they be autoflagged or marked as paywalled?
Should contributors post a summary that they have themselves written, and add the link elsewhere in their post for those interested? I do think that a smidgen of extra effort would be valued greatly by all.
I know there is HN guidance on this, and I have previously and regretfully posted paywalled articles, but keen on seeing is anyone has any new or better ideas. We should fork an open source browser and anytime a page bait and switches (providing anything but the article) the browser automatically loads the archive page instead. I’d switch to that browser instantly. Most of the time there's an archive.is link in the comments Unfortunately archive articles don't work for the worst offenders: Wall Street Journal, Financial Times (FT) and Bloomberg most notably. Paywalled sites should be automagically highted in RED when posted in HN, by HN script. Archive links work for some percentage of WSJ, FT and Bloomberg. And for the ones that don't work, if you wait a while (few hours to a day or two) and try again, many of the ones that did not work begin to work after the delay. Whether the article will still be valuable to read a day or two later depends upon the content. I don't like it either. Manually marking would be error-prone. I'd prefer a bot to spare readers the current labour of adding the archive.is copy (where available). I fully support your opinion.