Thanks for the pointer. Sent an email just now.

Direct motivation for the removal,

> That part I can help with: HN has a policy that paywalled content is okay as long as it's a soft paywall and there's a way to bypass it. AFAIK that's what the "web" button is there for, even if in my case it has not worked even once.

is wrong, though. While most sites have closed the loophole where visiting with a google.com referer header bypasses the paywall, Google still caches a full text copy if Googlebot isn't paywalled, and the cached copy can be accessed through "Cached" in the dropdown menu next to a Google search result. That works for many paywalled sites including Bloomberg.