I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. Someone posts an article or a link to support an argument, but it’s on a website where you have to either sign up to read, or be a paying subscriber. I find that really fucking annoying. Not to mention a lot of times people don’t even bother mentioning that there’s a paywall.
Some websites, like the WaPo, only let you read so many articles for free, or you have to disable ad blockers.
I don’t think there should be a rule about this, just that it’s kind of a douchey thing to do. YMMV
On a related note, why does Google news do this? They have hundreds of sources for every story and yet they consistently show the one behind a paywall.
At times I’ve wondered how much disinformation gets spread to the public on account of the fact that if you look up a story, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the LA Times are all paywalled, but the Washington Times, Breitbart, and Daily Caller aren’t.
On a similar note, don’t post fucken links to YouTube without some sort of commentary. I am NOT going to sit through x minutes of video to get you point, especially when I’m working.
I disagree. There’s nothing douchey about the idea that truthful information or valuable content is worth an exchange of value. People should pay for news, especially the news from high-quality news operations.
And if the source is actually offering content for merely signing up, and not charging money, then there’s no issue. If you want the information, then just sign up. It’s not douchey to link to it. If signing up is somehow beyond your capacity, that’s on you.
People should become accustomed to the idea that professionals producing news need to be paid. An occasional reminder of that from a link to a paywalled article—or even a limited free offer—is a good thing.
While I agree professionals need to be paid, and I do, in fact, subscribe to a couple of news sources, I can not afford to subscribe to ALL of them.
Yes, when you’re subscribed you can easily forget about the paywall.
Even so, linked to a paywalled article without a heads up is on the douche side. Ditto for linking to a video and expecting people to sit through 20/30/40 minutes of video, or an hour or two, to get to the point.
I kind of agree if we’re talking about a hard paywall like The (London) Times, but every browser I know of provides a solution that takes two or three clicks at most to get through a soft paywall (including the one used by the Washington Post).
For those who are unaware, you right click on the link (or tap and hold in a mobile browser) and choose to open it in a private/incognito tab.
Yes, you cannot pay for all of them. Which means that for some of them you’ll have to register for free access, some of them you’ll use the limited free function, and some of them you’ll have to rely on the poster’s use of limited quotes. If it’s really import for you to read the original source in a particular instance maybe you’ll decide to purchase one-time access. That’s how it was before the internet after all, only much less convenient. The internet gives you convenience, but no one owes you free references (especially when it actually is free, like with free registration).
Yeah, unfortunately they’re all still stuck on the antiquated 20th century model of subscribing to “the paper” and having the whole thing dropped on your porch. You either subscribe to the whole damn paper or not, even if you don’t use 90% of it.
Agreed. News media are in dire straits these days, and complaining about how people are using them and discussing them even when you won’t pay them? I’m not down with that complaint.
It was mentioned already, but it’s worth repeating. If you’re a subscriber and always logged in, you likely don’t realize that other people can’t view the article.
Yahoo does this as well. I’m assuming that the news the put on their front page is less curated and more paid to be there by the website that links to it, like an ad for the site.
Any website that works like that (my local paper is one), can usually be bypassed by right clicking on the link and opening it in a private/incognito mode.
Also, if I have to disable my adblocker, I’ll leave a site as well.
I don’t mind paywalls in general, nor even the OP’s complaint about links on the Dope to articles behind them. But I am down with the complaint about Google returning paywalled links because often you can find the same story on a non paywalled site so why burn up your hits? And I also dislike any paywalled paper having a video link show up because I will not watch video articles but they still burn up my articles. Once I burnt up all of my articles because I thought that I was mistaken and the video was the wrong link so I kept trying to get to the “real” article.
I hear what yu’re saying, OP, but sometimes the paywalled article is the only reporting of certain stories. WaPo is good for that. If I can, I try to also provide an un-paywalled link, but that’s not always possible.
Speaking as one of the board’s foreigners, who often have to scour the web in order to find a cite in English: if you can’t post something everyone here can read, then STFU.