Item — HN Reader

> should not be posted

How do you expect OP to know/check if the article is available in anyone region?

Following your though there’s plenty of content that should not be posted here because not available in PRC.

I was also (very) pissed off to see that blocker. HN magic came into the rescue and someone posted an archive link. Not sure if it has been proposed before, but a field for alt link would be nice.

1 comments

I do not expect the OP to know that (he must have seen the article in order to read it and post it), but I do expect HN to remove this sort of thing. We are getting an increasingly fragmented world with walled gardens or silly exclusions. This is not something we should tolerate. It's discrimination and is against the spirit of the Internet.

Rewarding sites that exclude and discriminate is not something HN should do.

I think HN should have a policy "if it's not on the internet, we don't link to it". That includes paywalled content, regionally-restricted content, and anything else that is not on the Internet.

Your PRC argument is flawed. PRC self-censors and you don't get Internet in the PRC, you get a state-censored version. I'm talking about discriminating at the source.

this to me is nonsense.

the article is available on the internet. you can freely access it from almost anywhere.

the problem is that the politicians of the day of some regions (china, australia, european union etc) decided that the freely available internet does not really fit with their worldview. as such they created rules that in effect split their internet from others.

this naturally lead to a mass adoption of things like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/451...

luckily, at least for now, those regions still have access to VPN.

No, the website specifically refuses to provide the content to a range of IP addresses (anything not in the US, I'm guessing).

Don't confuse this with local censorship.

> No, the website specifically refuses to provide the content to a range of IP addresses

yes, just like any other website that blocks certain regions and countries.

Ok, in that case I misunderstood your point. I do not understand how "the politicians of the day of some regions (china, australia, european union etc) decided that the freely available internet does not really fit with their worldview. as such they created rules that in effect split their internet from others."

As I understand it, the rule (IP-based exclusion) was created by the website owner, not "the politicians of the day of some regions".

The rule is created by the website owner to avoid getting sued into oblivion by not following GDPR (written by politicians), which it shouldn't really have to, because this is a local news affiliate for a city in the United States. I wouldn't exactly call that "local censorship".

Reading accepted instead of posted in your first post seems more fair.

I share your frustration of the walled gardens and seeing HN embracing that is very sad. In the meantime I can’t help but think about that discussion on open source/free licensed that should or should not allow copy to a closed source commune or commercial content.

What would you think of HN links treated as list of links that people can appended, up or down vote?

I agree my PRC argument is flawed for the reason you pointed, thanks.

>It's discrimination and is against the spirit of the Internet.

The Internet was technically a US weapons project, idk what the "spirit" should be there ;)