I took it as sending the occasional article to people you know. Not as a way to poke a hole through the paywall and send (via HN) it to thousands and thousands of people.
Certainly I don't want large amounts of our content to be distributed this way, but an occasional posting that puts an LWN article at #1 on HN is going to do us far more good than harm.
(That said, I do appreciate your concern!)
I think that this may convince me that I need to move it up higher on my list of priorities!
I read the kernel page and front page religiously, and read bits of the others.
I can't imagine how many things I've learned following the kernel's development. But the mailing lists are HUGE and thus hard to follow. LWN makes keeping up possible.
Separately, there's pretty much no better linux news source, and imo subscription is worthwhile.