There are thousands of separate paywalls out there, so if the HN front page is full of paywalled links, most of us won’t be able to read any of them. This might make sense if there were a tech wire service we agreed on using.
You have a point. Perhaps there should be a rule that paywalled links can only be submitted with a (user-written) summary? Does take away a bit from the paper's income, though.
Often the papers are doing the same, they're taking the information from a third-party that actually did the journalism.
Yes, there's value in aggregation, which is why tech news sites mostly just use Reddit to harvest stories from a week or so after they appear. IMO that's very low value.
If the "news" sites wanted to encourage reward for sources they could start by attributing every story and indicating who they paid and the originator of the factual data. Truly though most of them would seemingly rather we paid them whilst they just regurgitate a social news site.
