And yet I do pay subscriptions for the news and publications whose content I find good enough to be interested in what they will publish next, or if I support what they stand for. However, I feel no reason to pay subscriptions for one-off articles that may interest me from the myriad of media companies that I don't care to follow for one reason or another if they send me the content anyway. Their business model is not my problem.
Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here.
Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong
with paywalled links.
For me, as an author, I find myself in a ridiculous situation when I
want to share with friends works I've done for a site that uses
paywalls but doesn't pay me (yes this happens in the real world of
publishing). So I am ambivalent and often share a link along with
instructions on how to bypass access controls.
But more generally I am irritated by links other people share, such as
here on HN, that are paywalled. I'd rather not know about them than
experience the frustration and time-waste of following them.
So there is a contradiction/tension at the heart of digital
publishing, that creators, critics, researchers and commenters really
want exposure/reach more than they want (or get) money.
That said, paywalls are not the only problem and are more
understandable than sites that block Tor, use Cloudflare, Geo-block,
or those brain-dead ISPs or university sysadmins who block sites based
on broad keywords so that almost any kind of research is impossible
without tunnelling out past their crappy firewalls.
