Believe it or not, outside the VC bubble, businesses need to make money to survive. (I know, right? Shocking!) Without revenue, there won't be a New York Times anymore. The paywall seems to be helping with that (see: http://allthingsd.com/20120806/the-new-york-times-reports-a-..., http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-12-20-the-new-york-ti...), and it's low enough that it's never seriously inconvenienced me as a non-subscriber. (Though it has prompted me a few times to think about becoming a subscriber, which is a feature, not a bug.)
The whole point of a news aggregator is to make it easy to find and consume content. It's bad form to link to content that a large chunk of their audience can't easily read, and by "easily" I mean "click the link". I get that the NYT has some worthwhile content that doesn't exist elsewhere, but paywalled links on HN should be clearly marked at the very least.
You get a small number of free articles per month, tracked by cookie, before they start paywalling you. A regular HN reader can hit that cap pretty fast.
So many posts on HN encourage startups to charge their customers and not to fall into the trap of offering everything for free...
When it comes to content, I think we should be encouraging companies to find ways to fund high quality content. That's what the NYT has done with their metered pay wall, and it feels like this is something that should be encouraged. Otherwise they will become yet another newspaper that is sold off or shut down...
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Please stop linking nytimes.com. I understand it's simple to subvert the paywall, but they shouldn't be encouraged regardless.
Seriously?
Believe it or not, outside the VC bubble, businesses need to make money to survive. (I know, right? Shocking!) Without revenue, there won't be a New York Times anymore. The paywall seems to be helping with that (see: http://allthingsd.com/20120806/the-new-york-times-reports-a-..., http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-12-20-the-new-york-ti...), and it's low enough that it's never seriously inconvenienced me as a non-subscriber. (Though it has prompted me a few times to think about becoming a subscriber, which is a feature, not a bug.)
So what's the beef?
The beef is posts to paywall sites need to be tagged somehow.
The whole point of a news aggregator is to make it easy to find and consume content. It's bad form to link to content that a large chunk of their audience can't easily read, and by "easily" I mean "click the link". I get that the NYT has some worthwhile content that doesn't exist elsewhere, but paywalled links on HN should be clearly marked at the very least.
Interestingly enough, whenever I go to nytimes I don't see a paywall. And I'm not a customer, either. ? Hmm.
You get a small number of free articles per month, tracked by cookie, before they start paywalling you. A regular HN reader can hit that cap pretty fast.
So many posts on HN encourage startups to charge their customers and not to fall into the trap of offering everything for free...
When it comes to content, I think we should be encouraging companies to find ways to fund high quality content. That's what the NYT has done with their metered pay wall, and it feels like this is something that should be encouraged. Otherwise they will become yet another newspaper that is sold off or shut down...
I wish I had enough HN karma to downvote you.
Maybe linking to Google's I'm Feeling Lucky with the NYT title as the search term will work
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&q=let%20...
Wow, really. Charging money for a product is a crime now? We must shun this practice? Ridiculous.