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However this is all scooting around the fundamental problem that we are all individually responsible for critical thinking - ideally developed through primary and secondary education.
Shouldn't HN respect the distribution decisions of content owners? The primary link on an HN story is always the paywalled link, which offers search engine benefits to the target.
There's a long history of multi-channel distribution policy and variations in priced and non-priced benefits to content owners, from the first days of print to the ever-evolving online economy of paywalls, traffic brokers, ad brokers, content scraping and surveillance capitalism.
They allow their paywalls to be bypassed. (There are a few that don't, but most are permissive.) You might want to consider why this is the case.
Paul Graham wrote about it here: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I fully acknowledge the PR industry exists but to suggest that coverage of a beloved indie game creator by one of my industry's most respected reporters is somehow paid off or inauthentic because PR exists is such a leap. As I said earlier he's probably been trying to write about the Stanley Parable for years.
I also have firsthand experience of people I know at startups believing that their PR firm 'bought' them coverage. But if you read Paul's essay again he's careful to acknowledge that the service good PR firms are able to provide is that they can connect with journalists for stories not because of some shady undisclosed loyalty but because the PR people bring them interesting topics.
I've seen this happen internally at my last employer, but have the impression that it's standard operating procedure in corporate marketing these days. It is quite gross and I'd like to see it banned wholesale (or at least the relationship should be mandatorily disclosed). But... we would need to believe as a country in regulating ourselves to do that.
Anyway if you believe arts criticism is 'quite gross' and want it banned, what does that world look like? Should people who make things not be allowed to tell publications about it? Will there be a cone of silence around new games?