It's not our problem if media sites send us the full content of their articles and expect our browsers to implement their arcane decisions whether to magnanimously allow us to see it this time or not.
If they don't like it, it's trivial to put their content behind a requirement to log in with a validated account. In fact, it's even easier than what they do now!
Oh, but wait, that won't play with the SEO, user engagement, social media sharing, dark patterns to entice users to pay by offering them a few crumbs now and then... Again, not my problem. They do them, I'll do me.
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.
If they don't like it, it's trivial to put their content behind a requirement to log in with a validated account. In fact, it's even easier than what they do now!
Oh, but wait, that won't play with the SEO, user engagement, social media sharing, dark patterns to entice users to pay by offering them a few crumbs now and then... Again, not my problem. They do them, I'll do me.