Who do you expect to pay for journalism?
It's akin somewhat to the open-source crowd demanding features (and security updates) all without donating to the project.
You are putting words in my mouth I've never said. I don't "expect in-depth articles", HN would be perfectly fine without paywalled content.
Did you know that video game piracy enhances video game sales? That's because if someone pirates a game and likes it, they might buy it, recommend it to friends, or buy the next one.
At every level of quality, there is more journalism than there was before.
> In 1990 we had one daily news(paper) journalist for every 4,490 Americans. Now (or 2019 to be exact), we have one such reporter per 14,250.
https://www.reportforamerica.org/2021/06/28/the-journalist-p...
You appear to be confusing the health of a certain class of employment with the health of the product people in that class used to produce.
Do you think that journalism can't exist outside of a newspaper?
I personally loves the way HN pages are served as they are loading very fast even on not-high end devices, and volunteers contributes to the content (comments).
Paywall are annoying and there’s always someone that post an archive link to circumvent it but I’m not sure about the ethic of a rule requiring to do so.
HN readers are also free to pass on an article they can't read. Sometimes I do this when a US website has a complete block on Europe.
Paying for all the publications that get articles on the HN front page would be very expensive. Only a minority of people reading HN would have subscribed to any one publication. The result is that paywalled articles can only be properly discussed by a minority people. It also encourages discussion of the headline instead of the article.