Ads are annoying, and virtually nothing is valuable enough to bother paying to read a single article for. I subscribe to a number of substacks by writers I know produce reliably good content all the time, but random articles on HN ain't it chief.

Implied contracts aren't a thing. If someone sends me some trash along with the content I requested, I'm absolutely free to configure my own device to ignore the trash and only display the useful content.

I've never seen paywalls neither on Medium nor on Substack, but I've seen plenty of annoyances like Substack's "hey, did you know this is a mailing list, subscribe to it" in-your-face modal and Medium's "sign up blah blah" thing that takes up half my viewport area.

If you need to pay for subscription to read about how subscription is ending, that's sort of amusing. Anyway, this article isn't paywalled and can be read without subscription.