Thanks! The WSJ article was the submitted URL, but I've changed it to the governor's statement now. Interested readers will probably want to look at both.
WSJ's paywall, particularly against Archive Today, has been hardening markedly of late.
I'm repeatedly seeing A.T. links posted which read "you have been blocked" or similar. Sometimes those resolve later, sometimes not.
HN's policy is that paywalls are permissible where workarounds exist. WSJ is getting close to disabling those workarounds.
The NYTimes similarly tightened its paywall policy a few years ago. A consequence was that its prevalence on the HN front page fell to ~25% of its prior value, with no change in HN policies (as reported by dang), just member voting patterns.
Given the difficulty in encouraging people to read articles before posting shallow-take comments, this is a significant problem for HN, and the increased reliance of media sites on paywalls is taking its toll on general discussion.
There are literally hundreds of news sites, and many thousands if individual sites, submitted to HN and making the front page annually. It would cost a fortune, not merely a small one, to subscribe to all of these.
> There are literally hundreds of news sites, and many thousands if individual sites, submitted to HN and making the front page annually. It would cost a fortune, not merely a small one, to subscribe to all of these.
No one has the time to read all of them, so it doesn't really matter if it would also be unaffordable.
The result would be to either concentrate the discussion (to the few sites which are widely subscribed), fragment the discussion (among those who subscribe to a specific submitted site), or in all likelihood, both.
HN takes pride in being both a single community and discussing a wide range of sources. Wider adoption of subscriber paywalls online would be inimical to both aspects.
Someone emailed and suggested it. I looked at the pdf and it seemed to be more substantive than the usual political statement, so I sort of trusted that it would be better. Also it's not paywalled.
I usually prefer the press release and only read a third party report if I'm looking for more context. So thanks for making it easy to find the primary source of the news here.
FWIW I think you made the right call here. The PDF is substantive, primary, and has no paywall. The pinned WSJ article at the top gives best of both worlds.
