Half of Lemmy when someone posts a thought-provoking article
I will leave you with this: How to Bypass a Paywall
Consider that me acting as your Grizz and Dot Com bringing you your Sean Johns.
You're viewing a single thread.
Nobody wants to read articles, they just want to read headlines and react.
You could post an archive.is version of whatever you wanted to discuss and 85% of the comments will still not have actually read the article. It has nothing to do with availability of information and more to do with the laziness of internet users in general.
I'm staunchly against posting archive links directly. The canonical URL next to the headline at least lets you know where it came from. Archive links obfuscate the source and let a trash tabloid headline carry the same weight as one from a reputable source.
That's especially important since, as you said, people just want to read the headline and react.
That's also fair, because I think Lemmy has a massive sourcing problem in general.
People straight up post propaganda. I get that every news source is biased but when the url is like therealtruth.xyz, it starts to get increasingly suspect.
It's more to do with efficiency and one-to-many relationships. If op posts an archive link, only one person (op) has to lookup the link. Everyone else benefits.
Otherwise hundreds or thousands of readers have to individually look up the non paywalled link, or more likely, just skip the article altogether. So if you want to nudge people to read the article, why not just take a brief moment to reduce the effort required, and the article more accessible?
It's hardly a big ask, and I really don't see any good reason for the pushback. Ops time is so valuable they can't spare 30 seconds to get an archive link, but they expect the readers to each take that time?
Nobody wants to read articles, they just want to read headlines and react.
EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT! LITTLE BOY YELLING HEADLINES ON THE CITY STREETS INFURIATES CITY!!!
Before paywalls became ubiquitous, there were less people commenting on only the headline. It's not the only reason, but it's pretty obvious why it would promote that kind of behavior.
If this was completely true then people wouldn't be complaining about paywalls