>I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed.
Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.
This argument doesn't make sense. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles and other things. A prerequisite to discussing an article is to read more than its title. Sure, "real journalism" is good to have, but given that posts like this are allowed, what fraction of commenters in threads like this will sign up and support non-corporate journalism, and what fraction will clutter up the thread with uninformed comments?
The argument doesn't make sense to you because you assume every other person on the site isn't willing to pay for news. However, there is a 3rd option: you could just not participate. There is nothing in the HN rules that dictate you must participate in everything posted here.
By HN design, if such sites aren't useful to the HN community, they wouldn't be regularly upvoted. However counter to that, every week you see an article from wsj.com, theinformation.com or bloomberg.com hit the front page, precisely because despite having paywalls they continue to produce good content. Given the amount of engineers sucking six figure salaries on this site, I'd say a good percentage of them who might value actual news may pay for a subscription, which is why these sites continue to be posted here. I wouldn't want to see wsj.com downweighted below buzzfeed.com just because buzzfeed is free.
The ones who choose to complain, rather than just abstaining, are the problem. They could simply decide to not participate and HN wouldn't be any worse off. However the complaining that news organizations must (1) offer all news for free (2) don't use ad networks and (3) not be mouthpieces corporate PR is not going to accomplish anything.
News publishers worldwide are setting subscription prices too high for any one reader to support all of them, because that wasn't practical in the age of print. But it's the only way for a publisher to be compatible with a worldwide news aggregation and discussion audience.
Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.