Do you think the 1,600 journalists at The New York Times, many of whom work in difficult environments (including the White House, lol), should work for free? Quite the Scrooge move.
NYT one of the largest most profitable companies pretends to show you an article baits you and demands money and you are a scrooge for not paying? In that context they are the rich entity and should give the content away (the way Scrooge should have). No where in the story does it mention Tiny Tim finding coal in Scroogle's garbage and someone stopping him and calling him cheap for not paying full price because Scrooge employes so many people.
This is the most important point here. If your content is not actually public, you really shouldn't get the benefits of search engine exposure, HN exposure, or even the distribution from sharing what appears to be a URL to a hypertext document.
It's not free, but I've found it to be a great way to read the NYTimes.
Example of the 10-page daily PDF: https://timesdigest.com/samples/timesdigest
Seconded. There's something very tasteless about a bunch of very well paid tech employees who'll readily decry adtech, tracking and data brokerage (despite many of them working on it themselves), who'll proclaim "there has to be another way!", who'll also lambast modern journalism for "falling quality", circumventing content subscriptions and depriving publishers of revenue simply because of a built-up sense of entitlement to everything being free.
If the content is worth reading, i.e. it's from a publisher you believe to be of sufficient quality to try and find methods to work around their subscriptions, then it's worth paying for.
NYT does do good journalism, but, even for a company with their credentials and resources, its share seems to be ever dwindling as time goes on.
I felt forced to disable cookies and javascript on the following sites just after exclusively clicking on links submitted to HN: NYT, Medium, Washington Post, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and Harvard Business Review.
I'd prefer if submitters choose more user-respecting sources, but until then I refuse to feel guilty over stopping these intrusive sites and their dark patterns.
I'm happy to pay for content. I donate $10/mo to both Mother Jones and ProPublica. That's more for each than the cost of a New York Times subscription. Neither of these has a paywall. I'd prefer that they didn't have popovers either, but that's about as good as I can expect in the modern anti-privacy, anti-attention culture of the internet. I just don't feel obligated to pay for content that is sent to me without me ever agreeing to pay for it.
I also think search engines shouldn't index paywalled content, and that newsfeeds like HN or Reddit shouldn't allow links to paywalled content, and I consistently downvote paywalled content.
EDIT: I'm also going to start requesting that people not link to paywalled content when I see it, I think.