This is piece of shit website is demanding subscription or else I can't read the article. Fuck off.
- Good journalism comes at a price.
- Good journalism is vital to a healthy democracy.
Conclusion:
Your entitled and inarticulate refusal to pay will cost you dearly.
HN is filled with people bemoaning subscription software. Subscriptions, whether to software or news, shift power toward sellers and invite dark patterns for its abuse.
That abuse is well enough recognized to be the subject of an often celebrated (on HN) CA law attempting to make subscription less odious.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Can’t speak for parent but I’d be slow to conflate unwillingness to subscribe and unwillingness to pay.
But, although in general I dislike subscription models, they do make sense for newspapers. If they were to switch to "pay per article", it won't be long before the bean counters step in and turn the focus of the paper on social outrage and Kim Kardashian. It has the inherent danger of turning the NY Times into Buzzfeed.
And just in case someone is going to claim that Buzzfeed has serious news: the two are incomparable. Buzzfeed News' frontpage right now is literally Kanye, Kim, and Trump. Ukraine? Too far away. Sunak? Who's that?