But of course that becomes a bit of a blurry moral line. If I start browsing Google News in the hopes of stumbling upon a WSJ article so I can read it for free, is that immoral? What about if I google the headline of an article I'm interested in? Automatically setting my referer to facebook.com whenever I visit wsj.com probably goes too far, but then where do you draw the line?

Anyway, I feel very strongly that either everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here.

Then we'll have the laments: oh the ads, the humanity; or, why does all journalism suck?

Perhaps it is? I've almost never had anyone remark that I was doing something bad when not paying for a software or movie or music.

...which is exactly what the WSJ has been doing.

a lot of artists would PAY to get millions of downloads/views

it's a "logical fallacy" to assume they wouldn't

    SPIEGEL:  $  9.40
    FAZ:      $ 44.90
    WSJ:      $ 30.85
    Guardian: $  6.99
    KN:       $ 19.99
    
    -----------------
    Total     $112.13

I’m sorry, I’m a student, I don’t even have Netflix because that’s too expensive.

Because the publisher explicitly allows it.

It's really simple, if you want to put your content behind a paywall, then put it behind a paywall. Don't leave a backdoor open and then complain when people use that door.

By definition sharing means giving it away for free.

That'd have to be an incredibly large one-time payment. And how would we know how much to pay?

It doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem. The drug companies themselves must have budgets, and the publicly traded ones have a stock price. So someone somewhere must be able to create estimates for this.

Unfortunately, this kind of micropayment will not work for most people and perhaps more importantly will lead to less revenue for the publisher.

Clary Shirky has written about why micropayments [0] is the wrong model for consuming content more than a decade ago.

[0] http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

We're free to send them any Referer headers we wish... in a request. It's up to them to reply however they wish.

The l.php script basically allows someone to read the magazine without paying for it. The only entity that loses something in that situation is the content provider.

What do they lose?

There is a reason I subscribe to Netflix but not Hulu.

I had only discovered it when I wanted to resubscribe for other reasons; I probably would have done it earlier if I had known the option was available.

The difference between absolutely free like most content on the internet and the WSJ standard monthly rate of $33/month is truly enormous. The NYT, which I also feel is priced too high, is $15/month.

Remember Netflix costs $10/month-- that's the value proposition they need to compete against.

These content producers should charge $5/month, with no scummy "special introductory offers" where you just _know_ they're going to raise the price and screw you in a couple months. At that price I would subscribe to everything I read.

If I click on a google search link, I expect to see the same content google does.. for that matter, it's part of google's own rules... WSJ should not get a pass, and google should now deindex WSJ based on those rules.

Also, I think Facebook (and Twitter, and others) already have a Share button on all WSJ articles that would inform them when you visit that page.

Let's be real, they get data about you in a million ways. It'll all be aggregated somehow, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did aggregate in other ways like IP/browser, and those sharing links definitely leave cookies behind.

[0]: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Do we know that this will still work on Monday? Maybe this will also be closed and you'll need a special link?

What if my browser could just say "article will be 25 cents?" and I could say y/n? But instead, I have to sign up for a service, hand over my credit card, blah blah, and now you've wasted enough of my time that it was worth just me stealing it.

I'm pretty convinced it's just aUX thing.

This is even true if you only subscribe to relatively reputable traditional news sources, btw. Here are 12 that individually are worth it and most informed individuals would be served by reading on occasion, but few people would want to have individual subscriptions to them: WSJ, NYT, WaPo, The Economist, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Chicago Tribune, SF Chronicle, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Die Welt. Nevermind the fact that I do have subscriptions to 2 of those, and they compound the problem by serving annoying video ads even to subscribers.

Edit: A model that I would consider fair though (and the journals might not, I don't know their cost structure) is: 2-5 free articles a month without subscription of any sort and with unobtrusive ads, paid subscription if you read more articles a month from that particular journal. Another option is a "library" subscription model, in which you pay $20 or $30 a month, but get access to a broad catalog of newspapers (about what you would find at a large public library in print) and they get profits based on what you actually read. And yes, I have seen this as a startup idea, Netflix for news, but newspapers never seem to go for it wholeheartedly enough for it to be worthwhile to consumers, though.

I have much less brand loyalty now than say 10 years ago. I have less respect for both the WSJ and NYT than I did. I don't think their incentives line up with mine anymore, and it leaves me without a news source I trust the way I once trusted both of them.

A larger entity that doesn't need to worry as much about getting me to hit the clickbait would serve me better as a reader (and I'd then be more likely to subscribe). Or, if I could subscribe to individual reporters or small groups of them in some way (such as Dave Pell's style of content delivery, but more availability and let me pay them some how), it would also better serve me as a reader.

Instead we're stuck with a structure where they don't make enough money, and thus continue devaluing their brands, and we as readers don't have an easy way to know who we can trust to respect us as customers (no surprise video ads, unbiased reporting, etc). So I guess I'll stick with using sites like HN to aggregate the news for me, and stop clicking on the WSJ links. The brand no longer signals unbiased quality journalism to me.

Now a days what we have is: individual journalists/teams that investigate and produce analysis, aggregators like HN or Reddit who point our which content is interesting/relevant and traditional media outlets which mostly serve to vouchsafe to some degree that the content is factual and credible. We can't get rid of the last component because we end up with no way of distinguishing real news from propaganda, disinformation and innuendo, and also because we haven't found a way to directly pay the first group except through the media orgs. A fully centralized system that certified news "accuracy" is the stuff of Orwellian fiction, though, so that's a non-starter. You could have a federated certification system, I suppose, where articles are published by individual journalists and then groups and institutions vouchsafe for the veracity of stories or the record of the journalist (sort of like TLS CAs or a web of trust of journalist peer review), but you still need to come up with a good way to pay all of the parties involved. That said, in principle, I'd rather pay for each individual article, or a monthly fee for access to nearly-all the articles available, than for a subscription to a very specific collection of articles in the way you do now with news subscriptions.

  Its much easier for me to pay $10 a month

1. Nobody used it

2. It didn't block ALL ads, just most (based on if you won or lost the bid)

3. There was a LOT of backlash against it because it was google and even though you can opt out of tracking nobody believes them.

4. The old "adblock is free" argument.

It used to be that you'd pay an amount between $1 and $15 per month and it would use that money to "bid" on ad spots like a normal advertiser would. If you won the bid, you'd see a picture, a pattern, or anything else you wanted in that spot. If you lost, you'd see another ad.

The fee split worked identically to a regular ad, so Google would take their cut, the site would take the rest. And any money not spent at the end of the month was refunded back to you (not rolled over, actually put back in your bank account).

But I'm arguing that publishers could simply sell per-article access. As an alternative to subscriptions. I used the current ad-brokerage system as an example, because it's so hugely cumbersome. But I'm not arguing that users should simply bid against advertisers.

- it was poorly advertised (irony!); I only found out about it from a Google engineer that said, "This is probably the kind of thing you'd pay for"

- US only

You can even get your money back when reading accidentally (guess that doesn't work 10 times in a row, but it's a good feature).

I wish there were a way to buy access to individual articles .

If you think a product is valuable, but you don't want to pay for it because you don't like the person selling it that makes you a retributive thief. You don't even have ideology to hide behind, you just don't like someone.

http://www.copyhype.com/2013/09/why-copyright-infringement-i...

  javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

  javascript:window.location="https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&url="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

Create a bookmark of any page, by going to a URL such as https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122878081364889613 (note that only the top part of the page loads) and enter Cmd (or Ctrl) D. Now Save the bookmark to your bookmark bar. Find the bookmark, right click, and replace the WSJ URL with the javascript URL in the parent post. Save and now test by clicking the bookmark in the bookmark bar. After a redirect through Facebook, the full WSJ article should display.

Another useful bookmarklet for deleting annoying DOM elements:

  javascript:(function(){document.styleSheets[0].addRule(".highlighted_to_remove","background:red !important");var e=function(e){if(e.keyCode==27){i()}};document.addEventListener("keydown",e);var t=function(e){e.stopPropagation();this.classList.add("highlighted_to_remove");return false};var n=function(e){e.stopPropagation();this.classList.remove("highlighted_to_remove");return false};var r=function(e){this.parentNode.removeChild(this);i();e.preventDefault();e.stopPropagation();return false};var i=function(){var i=0;var s=document;while(s=document.body.getElementsByTagName("*").item(i++)){s.removeEventListener("mouseover",t);s.removeEventListener("mouseout",n);s.removeEventListener("click",r);s.classList.remove("highlighted_to_remove")}document.removeEventListener("keydown",e)};var s=0;var o=document;while(o=document.body.getElementsByTagName("*").item(s++)){o.addEventListener("mouseover",t);o.addEventListener("mouseout",n);o.addEventListener("click",r)}})()