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Whether the posting of subscriber links is “occasional” as of late is debatable.[1] Most of LWN’s paywalled content is posted on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32926853



jaimehrubiks stated unequivocally without substantiation that "Somebody asked before to please not share lwn's SubscriberLinks". LWN's founder & editor has repeatedly stated otherwise, hasn't criticised the practice, and participates in the practice himself, as recently as three months ago.

SubscriberLinks are tracked by the LWN account sharing them. Abuse can be managed through LWN directly should that become an issue. Whether or not that's occurred in the past I've no idea, but the capability still exists and is permitted.

No link substantiating jamiehrubiks' assertion seems to have been supplied yet.

I'm going to take Corbet's authority on this.


Corbet repeatedly used the word “occasionally,” sometimes even with emphasis.

What I’m saying is that the current situation is that most of the for-pay content of LWN is available on HN which is at odds either with his wish that it be occasional or with my understanding of English.


Most of those submissions die in the queue.

I'd set a 20-comment limit to the search I presented for a reason. At present, the 30 results shown go back over 7 months. That's roughly a significant submission per week.

Contrasting a search for "lwn.net" alone in submissions, the first page of results (sorted by date, again, 30 results) only goes back 3 weeks (22 days). But most of those get little activity --- some upvotes, and a few with many comments, but, in a third search sorted by popularity over the past month,

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...>

Ten of those meet or beat my 20-comment threshold, 20 don't. And note that 20 comments isn't especially significant, 4 submissions exceed 100 comments.

lwn SubscriberLink & > 20 comments, by date: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

All "lwn.net" for past month: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...>

Data:

Comments: 189 94 155 254 153 29 46 10 14 20 13 12 89 10 21 1 8 0 1 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 0

Points: 306 271 254 240 166 114 109 89 62 58 53 45 42 39 37 30 20 7 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3

I'm not saying that the concern doesn't exist. But ultimately, it's LWN's to address. The constant admonishments to not share links seem to fall into tangential annoyances and generic tangents, both against HN guidelines: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

I'd suggest leaving this to Corbet and dang.




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