This is an aside, but I think it's interesting: The Information is a hard-paywalled site with a very expensive subscription ($39 USD monthly or $399 annually). Normally you can't read any articles on the site without a subscription.
However, the query string on this link bypasses the paywall for this specific article:
If you remove the pu= variable, you'll hit the usual paywall.
The submitter's profile says "Director of Growth @ The Information". They've been submitting The Information articles to HN for the last couple of weeks with paywall bypasses to try to attract new subscribers.
It's good content, but it's also definitely advertising. Is that a problem? I'm not sure, this is a pretty unusual situation.
Honestly, it was more of a symptom of seeing our content posted on here organically and then the accompanying complaints about the paywall from the community.
There's obviously upside to having more eyeballs on our content.
It seems to be acceptable for HN readers to share workarounds for paywalled content (although it's a practice I strongly disagree with) so I don't see why HN would have a problem with the content creator themselves providing a workaround.
However, the query string on this link bypasses the paywall for this specific article:
If you remove the pu= variable, you'll hit the usual paywall.The submitter's profile says "Director of Growth @ The Information". They've been submitting The Information articles to HN for the last couple of weeks with paywall bypasses to try to attract new subscribers.
It's good content, but it's also definitely advertising. Is that a problem? I'm not sure, this is a pretty unusual situation.