The subject says it all, but am I the only one who isn't a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal? Is there no free source on the Internet for this same piece of news?
I'm not saying everything should be free. I build paid-for services on the web myself. But how is “To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In” useful on the Hacker News?
Plus, if you give in and subscribe to the WSJ they go out of their way to make it difficult to unsubscribe, requiring users to call in by phone and be subjected to a sales pitch just to cancel the recurring charges. It's a very scummy retention tactic.
It's so common, it's ridiculous. The NYT has the same policy, and you have to call in on certain days of the week at certain times. They even published an opinion piece decrying the practice while participating in it.
The call centre employees will even discount your subscription to try to keep you. Not at all cool.
I finally started letting Amex sort this out. I'll attempt to call to cancel a service (during my local business hours), follow up with a short letter if the call is unsuccessful.
After that, any new charges that appear result in a call to the Amex Fraud Dept. Sadly there have been a couple services I had to do this with.
I had the same thing with the Times (Murdoch-owned) in the UK. I remember that I got through on the phone but they said that it wouldn't be possible to cancel my account without charging the next two (monthly) billing cycles.
I cancelled my card and somehow they managed to cancel the account once payment didn't go through.
Only fucking subscribed because of one article we were in, ended up paying for almost a year of none-usage.
Fyi: I subscribed briefly through their iOS app. The Apple app store allows you to easily manage subscriptions made through any app from the store, which made it much easier to cancel.
I had a subscription to sugarsync for a few months longer than I needed due to their "cancellation dept" only being open a few hours a day in some far off timezone. Hateful.
Because sometimes they break stories and have exclusive content and in depth info that others won't have immediately if ever. For example they were ahead of everyone with the Theranos news.
I think the idea of putting links on HN is its better to know about it asap, rather than possibly using a slower or less comprehensive source.
> Because sometimes they break stories and have exclusive content and in depth info that others won't have immediately if ever
This story has been in Reddit home page for last 14 hours pointing to the original source on the official Samsung website[1]. This content is neither exclusive nor breaking.
That's a good point, and I applaud the Wall Street Journal for their journalistic efforts. I'm thinking we should get a WSJ subscription in our company.
I'm not so sure if Hacker News should be an outlet for breaking news. The HN platform is not very well suited for real-time news in general.
Myself, I use Hacker news for "daily important news" much less than breaking news.
I don't like getting into word definition argument but doesn't that information about Samsung fall under the daily important news rather than the breaking news ?
Yes, it does. That's why I'd like to see a link to a free source (that doesn't require one to pull ostentibly illegal tricks to read the contents) rather than an advertisement.
>I think the idea of putting links on HN is its better to know about it asap, rather than possibly using a slower or less comprehensive source.
I agree, but in light of the comments above about their horrific and unethical subscription-cancellation policies and practices, I think there should be a clear warning attached to every link from a news source like this, highlighting exactly what you're getting into if you choose to subscribe in order to read the article.
I hope he does try to sue for a link to google which has a link to his own site which behaves in a certain way based on the if HTTP_REFERER header says it was from google. He could stop the behavior at any time by changing his own code. It would set a good public precedent to help curtail such buffoonery moving forward.
The link at the top of the google result of the headline you should search. (But if you enjoy the WSJ, consider picking up a subscription or a paper from time to time.) :)
Rather than a down-vote, I'd be interested in some suggestions about what I'm doing wrong.
1. Click "web" (or alternately, Google the title of the article, verbatim from the article itself)
2. Click the appropriate link from Google, so that my referrer will be google.com.
When I do that, I still get the pay-walled article. I've tried deleting my wsj cookies and doing the same. I've tried using another computer on another network, with the same result.
That raises two questions for me: What am I doing wrong? Why do I get dinged without explanation for suggesting a second approach that does work for me?
Because due to a black hat trick called cloaking [1], Google penalizes pages that show different content to users and crawlers. So web sites serve a free version of their content to Google.
Google discourages websites from appearing in search but requiring registration to view. If the website detects that the user came from a Google search, they don't throw up the paywall.
WSJ's reporters and servers are funded by money, not nice words on HN. I don't understand everyone's obsession with bypassing paywalls on news links. I occasionally buy paper copies of newspapers.
Delete your *.wsj.com cookies, use a referrer control addon and set it to google.com for wsj.com and enjoy clicking HN links and not see the content block.
I don't love it, but I don't have a problem with it, mostly because I have no idea what other route they could take.
Ad-supported is something Buzzfeed can make viable, but it means tailoring both the substance and the form of their content to optimize for that. Doesn't work for WaPo.
I'm fine with the WSJ doing this. Businesses are free to monetize their content as they see fit.
I don't like that a link to a WSJ paygate page gets this amount of votes on Hacker News, when there are numerous free links available for the same information.
If anything, I'm saying "don't vote for paygate links" to whoever clicked to upvote on the OP link.
They have to be very careful -- Google's guidelines are very strict about content that they index. If you display different content to a user than the content that Google has indexed, that will cause Google to drop the page from their index, and may affect the overall quality rating for your site in Google's index.
Nobody really wants to cross them here; if you want your content indexed and displayed in search results, you have to show the full content to users inbound from search result pages.
I'm not saying everything should be free. I build paid-for services on the web myself. But how is “To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In” useful on the Hacker News?