Pompous boring filler in the house style?[1] Yawn, no thanks. As you say, there are plenty of free outlets of information. What more explanation do you need?

“Quality journalism” has its price, and the market doesn’t want to pay for it.

Quality software has its price too, but the market prefers Linux. Wait, are you associating “free” with “low quality” or am I? Who can tell with quality these days. One thing’s for sure, it’s a difficult issue.

[1] The text equivalent of Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news" segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

I have had a (paper) subscription to this and other quality news papers, but in my experience most of the content is news, opinion, sport / entertainment / culture, or advertisements / infotainment, and only a very small part I would consider to have journalistic depth. I would not mind paying for those articles, and I would even prefer they would extend these articles to a substantial read (say 1/3 the size of an average novel). However, somehow, newspapers keep holding on to the news paper model that exists since the late 19th century.

There's only a paragraph's worth of information in many stories, or there's just a cutesy headline and a momentary desire to find out what the story is about. Here it's 'procrastination is kinda good actually.' Big whoop.

Yes to both of your other questions.

Totally valid point.

Perhaps your questions are more general, but I'll speak for myself.

I don't consider paywalling quality journalistic content socially unacceptable. I consider dropping a link on a free discussion board to a site with a paywall to be beyond obnoxious (but not quite to 'unacceptable.')

I often work for free, but not always. I often pirate software, but not always. I pirate software when I can't get a trial; I've seldom found reason to continue using pirated software and thus don't pay for it. Software with trials (much like paywalled sites with a limited number of free articles each month) let me sample without cost and are indeed more likely to get me to pay.

As I said, I don't seek out paywalled content- I'm not visiting the NYT daily trying to find a way around the paywall so I don't have to pay. I don't subscribe and pay for these things because it's not a part of my life. I get news and opinions and entertainment from other sources, only as sporadically as my curiosity piques, and usually because it's in some public place (TV on in the lobby, newspaper on the security desk, etc.)

Quality journalism does have its price. As does poor quality journalism - they paywall both. But I can't be bothered to throw money at them so that I can learn who actually provides quality content ... because it's not a part of my life, nor do I want it to be. See sibling comments on content quality.

By themselves, paywalls are the very definition of "fair": you offer what you think is a valuable service and would like to be paid for it. That's fair. You're free to ask, I'm free to not read your stuff if I don't want to pay.

What makes linking to paywalls unacceptable is that links are not marked with a "paywall" tag of some sort. So it ends up being bait and switch and a waste of time.

Regarding subscriptions: I'm just not going to separately subscribe to three dozen news sources I regularly read, I'm sorry.

I would gladly pay per article, but unfortunately that is not an option.

I only see it considered unacceptable on Hacker News.

I find that letting search engines index your content and then paywalling it an unfair practice. The linked article, for example, is entirely googlable but not readable (try to google a phrase from the bottom of the article). Let alone it's against Google's policies.

There should be no distinction who's looking, with the only exception being paying vs. non-paying clients.