I don’t believe a workaround had been posted at the time I posted. I also attempted to try outline, but got an error on their site for the URL (something along the lines of url not valid for outline).
Is hn open source? If so, I’d love to try and contribute something perhaps that would allow users to filter out stories with a user-managed url blacklist. Seems like a reasonably simple solution. Any thoughts?
Thanks for the info regardless; I’ll refrain from complaining about paywalls from here on out (although, to be fair, this wasn’t a blanket complaint about paywalls; I’d asked if there was some type of filter I didn’t know about and proposed a possible solution).
I wrote a simple chrome extension which maintains a list of domains that you don’t like visiting, and then checks the DOM on pageload and makes links to those light grey. Super unpolished, I just made it for my own use, but it’s been nice - helps me avoid accidentally visiting obnoxious news/clickbait/etc sites.
1. Look at the domain. If it says "WSJ", don't click.
2. Accept the fact that there are people on HN who pay for WSJ, BusinessWeek, NY Times, etc. (as I do). These people like to read and comment on articles that are professionally written, edited, and fact-checked, despite having to pay for them. If this isn't what you want, that's OK. Let those who do prefer this sort of journalism read and comment on it without chiming in about the fact that it's not "free."
HN's policy [1] (in place for several years) is that articles are only allowed if they can be read without a subscription.
Paywalled sites are OK, if there is a known workaround - usually someone will post this in the comments.
If the paywall is impenetrable for that article, it shouldn't appear on HN, and you should flag the post and alert the mods via email (hn@ycombinator.com).
By the way, you'll get negative reactions to complaints like this, as this question has been raised and discussed countless times before on HN, and people get bored of seeing the same discussion over and over. The policy HN has adopted is considered to be imperfect, but the least-worst option.
The most relevant guideline to this situation is this:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
This wasn’t an egregious “wah, paywall” comment. I asked if there was a way to filter these out that maybe I didn’t know about and asked about there being a solution to the issue with some type of bot.
