It seems you’ve responded to a refusal to subscribe with an argument for willingness to pay. It is possible to be open to payment and not to subscription.
HN is filled with people bemoaning subscription software. Subscriptions, whether to software or news, shift power toward sellers and invite dark patterns for its abuse.
That abuse is well enough recognized to be the subject of an often celebrated (on HN) CA law attempting to make subscription less odious.
As I said: the message is rather inarticulate, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
But, although in general I dislike subscription models, they do make sense for newspapers. If they were to switch to "pay per article", it won't be long before the bean counters step in and turn the focus of the paper on social outrage and Kim Kardashian. It has the inherent danger of turning the NY Times into Buzzfeed.
And just in case someone is going to claim that Buzzfeed has serious news: the two are incomparable. Buzzfeed News' frontpage right now is literally Kanye, Kim, and Trump. Ukraine? Too far away. Sunak? Who's that?
Idk, I can’t assume he is unwilling to subscribe just from his complaint. In any case, nytimes initial subscription costs like 5 bucks a month for a year. There are bigger things in the world for everyone to worry about. OTOH, If this is all about principle, he can read it at a local library, assuming he is in US. In any case, they come across as entitled more than anything
HN is filled with people bemoaning subscription software. Subscriptions, whether to software or news, shift power toward sellers and invite dark patterns for its abuse.
That abuse is well enough recognized to be the subject of an often celebrated (on HN) CA law attempting to make subscription less odious.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Can’t speak for parent but I’d be slow to conflate unwillingness to subscribe and unwillingness to pay.