That's a really good idea. Are there any NYT folks here? Is there a procedure in place for doing this sort of thing? I imagine that news.ycombinator.com is a more common Referer than news.google.com in the development community; it'd be nice to have the same treatment from media organizations.
> I imagine that news.ycombinator.com is a more common Referer than news.google.com in the development community
I wouldn't be so sure of that; considering my own pattern, even when my reading is being driven by HN, I usually do several google searches for related content, including frequently Google News searches for related news items from other sources, for each page I go to directly from HN. And not all of my reading -- even related to development/startup things -- is driven by HN.
You can't show Googlebot one thing (the article) and real people another (the paywall) without being penalized and losing your free search traffic. That's why visits referred from Google see the full article. It's not because someone at NYT decided they don't want people from certain sites to become paid customers; if they could paywall Google-referred traffic without losing that traffic they would.
