I'm not asking people not to circumvent paywalls. In fact, if you reread my comment, I recommended the user leave an archive link, which is a method of bypassing paywalls that doesn't involve posting the full contents of the article to this site.
Unfortunately there's another problem with archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today . Their owner has some beef with Cloudflare DNS and returns bogus results to them so anyone using 1.1.1.1 as DNS can't visit them.
Common courtesy is to not even link to paywalled articles... The publisher has already made it clear they are not interested in public awareness of their content.
I hate paywalls as much as the next guy but when I think about it from the publisher's protective I really don't see a way to be sustainable in this environment without a paywall. I'm sure the writers mostly want their articles read but they also want (and deserve) to be paid for their work. How do you do that if, like you imply, the content needs to be completely free for everyone to access? And I'll bet you use adblock too (I sure do) making it even more impossible.
I don't know how this shit works but the way you frame it isn't it.
Yet these companies do allow Google et al to index their stuff, otherwise the paywall bypass addons, archive.ph etc wouldn't work. They want their cake and eat it. It's super annoying to find something on Google and then be hit with a paywall. Totally bait and switch.
If there weren't such great paywall-bypassing plugins I'd want a plugin that removes paywall sites from Google results, Lemmy submissions etc.
Also you really can't expect a user to subscribe to a full subscription to read a handful articles a month.
At least offer a once off small payment but almost nobody does that.
And I'll bet you use adblock too (I sure do) making it even more impossible.
Yes though the tracking is the most important reason there. If they just used untargeted ads it wouldn't be such a problem.