The ethics and consequences of dodging paywalls

Copyright law and ethics are not the same thing. I see no ethical problem violating copyright generally. It's illegal (or a tort) and has consequences, but that doesn't relate to ethics.

My stance, refined over years and years, is that if you're so desperate for my business, then you're not worth my time. Any site that I click and it immediately comes up with dancing babies and flashing neon "EAT AT JOES" will be closed on sight. If I'm skimming along, innocently reading an article, and you shove an email collector dialog into my face, you're ^W'd. See, it was so low-effort and low-stakes for me to visit there in the first place, I realized I never should've done it in the first place, and with a twinge of regret, the site is off my list.

I've gone further very recently, in exercising the blacklist of my NextDNS service. I've actually started a broad list of paywalling sites. If I got to any site and all its articles are paywalled, then I literally never want to go there again. *PLONK*. I mean not even via archive.is, that's how much I DGAF about the site.

I have the same philosophy with music and art and video. There's plenty of freely-licensed stuff out there. There's PD and there's CC content. A few years ago, I loaded up on all the PD/CC classical music I could find, which was gigabytes worth. And I just transfer that archive to every new device I use, and it's all libre, gratis, and guilt-free to boot.

So if content on the web is gently ad-supported, yes I will open my adblocker to admit you if possible, because I like to support sites which I use and benefit from, and it's not fair to visit them all while wearing a condom. https://xkcd.com/463/

I'm in an abusive relationship with YouTube, but please don't call the cops. I've started paying to rent films too. Just like Video Library, except I don't need to rewind!