This is all true. Paywalls are a reasonable method to pay content makers and there is nothing wrong with them per se. What I find offensive is paywalls which

This is all true. Paywalls are a reasonable method to pay content makers and there is nothing wrong with them per se. What I find offensive is paywalls which lower themselves selectively in order to SEO Google and Bing. That is, they're inserting their walled gardens into my searches of the open web in the hopes of manipulating me into subsidizing them. This is simply unethical. Also people posting paywalled articles on HN is very irritating.