I agree with everything you said. Favouring non-paywalled content is reasonable and sensible, and lots of interesting HN content was made for free. I'm only arguing that, in those cases where an article is being charged for, we should not attempt to duck that requirement through technology -- that's trying to get something for nothing.

And yes, this would in general mean fewer or perhaps zero such articles on HN. (For content producers, this is the flip side of paywalling your site: Less word-of-mouth on sites like HN.)

This is already a niche view, but even more controversially I think it applies to ad-supported content too: If a site offers free access to content but shows ads, we should not block those ads. It doesn't matter that pages encrusted with ads are annoying -- viewing the ads is part of the contract.