Paywalls have gotten quite prevalent over the years for a number of reasons I won't get into. I used to work for a company whose main income was selling ads on their posts about news, events, and the like, so I get the appeal of wanting people to pay for content.
How these sites tend to go about their paywalling business, however, never sat right with me. Annoying ads cluttering up your browser, tracking your browsing habits, and wasting your internet bandwidth are one thing. Paywalls are something else entirely.
To reap maximum benefit from things like SEO and news aggregators, these sites will lay their content bare for various internet robots. Google et al. are allowed to process everything, while we, the lowly people looking for the news, get naught but a teaser ⸺ and then some annoying box in our face to taunt us about how we're not gonna be reading a damned thing further.
It feels to me like one of those situations where you can eat your cake but also still have that cake afterward. Sites get to fully benefit from search engines and then benefit further by blocking regular people's access to the content. People can find it, but they can't read it. Fun.
There are numerous ways around such paywalls in many or even most cases, and they're not hard to find. Sometimes deleting your browse's cookies for a given site is enough. Sometimes enabling "reader mode" will suffice as all the content is there but only visually hidden. One method I'll highlight here is using an archival service like archive.is. Simply pop the URL of a piece of paywalled content into its "query" input and see what comes back.
Maybe you wanted to read about how ⸺ surprise! ⸺ egg producers have seen massive profits this past year despite all the alleged hardships they've been going through. After all, if things weren't going rough, why would eggs be $8/dozen? Curious, ain't it? Could it be that "inflation" as commonly used isn't real and is instead a convenient scapegoat for corporate price gouging? Well, the Financial Times has a piece on this egg nonsense, but you can't read it.
Or can you? Sometimes it really is that simple ⸺ no browser extensions or other trickery necessary. The very thing that allows these sites to benefit from search engines processing their content is also what allows sites like archive.is to go sniffing around.