We all know that many news sites have paywalls. It is, after all, some or a big part of how they've chosen to fund their news gathering. There are lots of ways around paywalls or to access individual stories behind one: e.g., archive.is or archive.today lets you search a news article link to see if it's already been saved, and frequently you can read the full story that way.

I mention this because I post a lot of links to stories that are behind paywalls, and a common reply is "paywall," as if a) that wasn't obvious and b) the link was somehow discovered to be serving malware or something. Sometimes I will post an archive.today link to a story if it's urgent and paywalled, but it's definitely not my job to do that and I've started muting the "paywall" whiners.

@briankrebs

The paywall "whiners" are doing a public service - a single paywalled article from a popular poster can waste the time of thousands of people. If I see "paywall" I can adjust my expectations and decide if It's worth the effort or I should just move along.

I'd honestly rather see an automatic paywall indicator as part of the client, but that may be infeasible - the client would need to know which sites the user subs to and it could be a headache.