Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here. Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong with paywalled links. For me, as a

Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here. Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong with paywalled links. For me, as an author, I find myself in a ridiculous situation when I want to share with friends works I've done for a site that uses paywalls but doesn't pay me (yes this happens in the real world of publishing). So I am ambivalent and often share a link along with instructions on how to bypass access controls. But more generally I am irritated by links other people share, such as here on HN, that are paywalled. I'd rather not know about them than experience the frustration and time-waste of following them. So there is a contradiction/tension at the heart of digital publishing, that creators, critics, researchers and commenters really want exposure/reach more than they want (or get) money. That said, paywalls are not the only problem and are more understandable than sites that block Tor, use Cloudflare, Geo-block, or those brain-dead ISPs or university sysadmins who block sites based on broad keywords so that almost any kind of research is impossible without tunnelling out past their crappy firewalls.