Interesting. I posted a Chrome extension that did the same thing a while back (WSJ specific) and HN unanimously told me I was in the wrong, so I took it down.
I think you had a branding problem. Yours appeared to be an attack on a brand that is doing good work; this one seems more to be thwarting a sinister publisher practice.
Responding to specific criticism from your comments:
> It does feel excessive or cynical or something to install an actual app to work around a paywall. The WSJ organization says, you must pay us $28.99 a month for full access to this content. That's the value they've placed on their content, that's the price they are charging, and that's what people should pay.
> The fact that they also make most if not all of the content available on a "complimentary" basis via Google suggests that they do value occasional visits from non-subscribers.
> However if millions of non-subscribers were to install a paywall avoidance app and access the full content on a daily basis, this would probably violate the spirit of "occasional".
WSJ certainly deserves to set whatever price on their work that they wish, and they also deserved to be compensated according to the value of that work.
However, if the workaround is no more in violation of the "spirit of occasional [visits]" than this publisher practice is in violation of the "spirit" of web navigation. That spirit is that users should not be discriminated against based on their navigation source.
Google search results should not be a representation of content that is not allowed to direct visitors. If WSJ wants to represent to Googlebot and Google visitors that the content is open, then it should be open to direct visitors as well.
If I, a user, did nothing special to access the content, I should be able to pass on the link to a new set of users. This practice breaks that, and, I imagine almost invariably, users will not understand why.
> WSJ certainly deserves to set whatever price on their work that they wish, and they also deserved to be compensated according to the value of that work.
Don't you think we should also have the option to decide not to pay using these "dirty" tricks of the trade?
Yes, that is what I am trying to say. Karunamon (above/below[1]) said it better than I did. The WSJ deserves to be compensated for their work if they ask to be (in other words, consumers should not "steal" the content), but my questions is whether they have actually asked for the payment.
In my opinion, this tactic is no different than offering it for free but then demanding payment anyway.
That's an answer to a different question. If WSJ, an amoral business entity, decides to serve different content to Google users and different content to everyone else, then you're left answering a question about user intent.
Personally, I don't think it's fair that WSJ simultaneously demands money for content but leaves open a loophole so they can get Google exposure, and then complain when people use said exposure. It smacks of wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
The entire point of the Google link and the whole paywall circumvention is so they can get traffic to their site, right? This implies that getting people on their site is more valuable to them than locking their content behind a paywall.
They could always serve only a summary to both Google and to nonsubscribers from other referrers, but this leads to people mentally filing them in the "useless link, never click" bucket along with Experts Exchange and other crappy content farms.
Actually, Google requires free article access from referrals to be included in Google News at all. (There are other ways, but I think that one was recommended.)
Wow, those comments are really odd. Every time a WSJ article is submitted here a comment contains a link to avoid the paywall, and every single time people are grateful.
Every time there is also somebody complaining that we shouldn't evade pay walls at all.
But that's indeed a really odd set of comments. While there is some criticism on this thread here, it's way more down to Earth, nobody is talking about theft or anything.
Maybe people feel that people should only avoid paywalls in a random and haphazard way, and not a systematic way, or that people should avoid paywalls whenever they want but not make it convenient for the general public to do that?
Is there a name for ethical notions related to whether people make a habit of something, or whether people help make something convenient?
It is called "abusing a privilege" , and most elementary school children are taught not to take all the cookies from the jar just because they are invited to take one.
If it makes you feel better, I feel that both extensions are wrong. If you enjoy reading the WSJ, you should pay for it. They do some really great business reporting and it's not that expensive.
I'm not saying I think the WSJ's paywall is a good idea (I don't), but if they want to try to make money to support their (largely very good) journalism that way, I don't think it's very nice for someone else to publish a tool that automatically subverts the paywall for countless other users.
> Would using the plugin be less acceptable if the paywall were harder to get around?
I don't see the plugin as getting around their paywall. I see it as getting around moronic web development.
For example, if a site has unbelievably intrusive advertising and I install an ad blocker. Or a site pops up a register for our newsletter modal and it's blocking the content and there's no way to close it ... so I open up the console and remove the dom node entirely so I can see the article.
In other words, stupid shit that 99.9% of people don't know how to get around, but a web developer can get around in a few seconds.
That's not hacking or bypassing anything, that's just moronic web development.
If you want to put up a paywall, that's fine. A wall is a wall. If you make a hole in the wall on purpose and people walk through that hole, don't blame the people ... blame the wall.
I guess I just disagree. Right now if WSJ comes up in your google results, the link works and you can read the article. If link didn't work and paywall appeared instead of the article, that would be a problem (which is why Google outlawed it).
Would you prefer it instead if WSJ.com just removed themselves from Google? And applied the paywall to everyone? I don't see how that's better. Or is the complaint that any paywall exists anywhere?
If you discover content via Google, you can see it. If you discover content via HN, you can't. Anyone who believes this is ok is pretty much saying they are opposed to net neutrality.
Traffic flowing through one discovery channel is free, but traffic flowing through another isn't. While technically separate from net neutrality as it's happening in a different place in the networking stack, it's the same principle: if it flows over the network, it should be equal.
> Traffic flowing through one discovery channel is free, but traffic flowing through another isn't.
That really misrepresents the case. Its not a difference in traffic costs, its a difference in whether the edge provider is willing to send its content over the network to you. And they are willing to do so if you are paying them directly, or you are sent by someone who is paying them with a certain quantity of exposure.
While you could probably formulate a single principle that would support both what you are calling for here and net neutrality, it probably would be a controversial principle even among people who support net neutrality, and wouldn't represent what many people who do support net neutrality support. Claiming that if someone doesn't agree with you on this they must oppose net neutrality is simply wrong, and unhelpful to either your cause of net neutrality.
The content is the same, it's the business model of the publisher that's different: ads vs subscription.
Google is just serving as an index, you can't read it on Google itself so why should they be able to discriminate content providers based on business model?
This is a strange comment. Google indexes and searches lots of things you eventually have to pay for. Google's a search product. Seems to me the perfectly natural state is "free organic traffic" from Google and the WSJ getting paid.
It's actually free. At least the first paragraph or so is. And a lot of the personal finance articles are totally free. About 99% of the time that's good enough for me.
So I don't bypass the paywall. I go to WSJ on a daily basis and simply read the free intro text.
I enjoy the WSJ enough that I would gladly pay them, except they play the usual pricing games, which I detest. I wish they just gave me their "best" price, and never tried to jack up that price to whatever they thought they could get away with at renewal. On a few occasions I've had a 1 year subscription for IIRC perhaps $99 but at renewal they tried to jack up the price substantially.
They've been playing these pricing games on and off for at least 10 years, if not longer. I have been willing to pay them at least $1,000 over that time. Instead they've gotten at most $200. But they're not alone in this. Most newspapers and magazines follow that pricing model.
OTOH the NY Times is great. I always clear cookies and browse w/o Javascript and I can read all the articles for free. This is a deliberate decision on their part. Still, I probably don't spend more than a few minutes a day on their site, so it's not like they could get $100/yr from me.
For a while, the NY Times was hilariously free. News articles were free, while they charged for their "editorial" content. That was perhaps a good idea for their core NYC demographic, but for other people (like me) the opposite would have been more attractive. How much would it cost me to keep from ever even seeing a headline for anything written by Maureen Dowd? Alas, that pricing model has long since changed.
In that post you didn't advertise that the "pay"wall can be circumvented just by Googling. It's possible HN perceives an ethical difference between that and a paywall where you actually have to pay.
Agreed. I think the commenters in the other thread might not have understood how the extension worked. While the end result is the same, it feels like there's a difference between "circumvent a paywall" and "pretend I'm coming from Google search result".
1) Many people are ethically opposed to circumventing paywalls.
2) Many people are ethically opposed to paywalls treating certain traffic as special or different.
As Jeremy says below:
"What's not so great is creating an internet where if you use our Trusted Corporate Partner™ you're allowed to view a public webpage, and if you come from anywhere less privileged on the internet, you're not. That's not sustainable. Lest we fall into a vortex where you're only allowed to browse the public web by logging in through Facebook. I wouldn't want to be online in that world."
I agree. I think the difference in responses from HN commenters is about which ethical evaluation people are focusing on, #1 or #2 above.
Hm. That is an unbelievably charming idea for an experiment. Does HN ever do April Fools' day experiments? That would seem worth it for the introspective value alone...
I'll chime in with that it's an interesting idea, OTOH my gut feeling is that most people won't come back to read article comments after this initial 6 hours or so — hence you might as well essentially make the user handles anonymous altogether.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109987
This time the comments seem to be mostly positive.