It's all so bizarre. They don't want to pay but expect in-depth articles.

It's akin somewhat to the open-source crowd demanding features (and security updates) all without donating to the project.

Jeff Bezos, probably. The internet really is the death of quality journalism, and democracy slowly dies with it.

Paying for individual publications you like is fine.

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.

Google, serving adds to the article reader? Adds are annoying, but we’re free to leave if we don’t like how a website is managed.

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.