Paywall Defiance
I maybe shouldn't tell you this, but there are ways around many of the paywalls you encounter on the web.
First, some terminology:
A "soft paywall" allows you to read/watch/engage with some content on a website, but will usually only give you a set number of views before it asks you to pay, subscribe, or otherwise become part of their system for moderating such things (and usually their system for earning money, over time).
A "hard paywall" is more solid in that it generally won't let you through if you haven’t paid or signed up, and you’ll need to do that if you want to even catch a glimpse of what it has to offer (beyond whatever preview it puts in front of that paywall).
There are a variety of both core types of paywall, including soft paywalls that badger you a little bit but that will always let you through if you know what link to click, and hard paywalls that will give you free access as long as you give them your email (paired with regular offers to become a paid subscriber, possibly at a discount).
My general policy is to become a paid subscriber of services and publications that I regularly use and want to support, to provide my email when that's all they're asking for (and liberally use the "unsubscribe" button in the marketing emails they send me, after clicking on any promotions that might allow them to earn some money from my clicks), and in the cases where I can't justify a subscription for something I use regularly, to figure out a way to bypass it while sending folks who can justify that cost their way whenever possible, and ideally finding something else they make that I can afford to purchase.
For instance, if I had infinite dollars I would gladly pay for the Financial Times and Bloomberg (and do pay for them when they periodically offer discounts that bring them down into my range), two publications that are top-notch sources of economic (and adjacent) news, but their business models are heavily biased toward customers with gobs of money and/or expense accounts through their employers—two things I don't have.
Thus, when I need to access these publications, I use a free service called Archive Today, which takes a snapshot of almost any website (capturing that page in chronological time) which you can then read, with sometimes minor display-related issues (garbled charts, missing visuals, etc).
There are other publications, like The Atlantic, which I love and periodically subscribe to at full price (ditto The New Yorker and Harper's), but in the off years when those subscription dollars are committed elsewhere I use a service called 12ft (a reference to the phrase "show me a 10-foot wall, I'll show you a 12-foot ladder") which, though it's less reliable than Archive Today, is also faster and more convenient for the sites on which it does work.
Important to note: any technique you might use to bypass paywalls can (and maybe will) go away at some point in the future (which honestly is only fair).
There was a time not long ago, for instance, when you could read the full version of any Bloomberg article by adding a period before the URL. I have no idea why this worked, but I made full use of the trick until it disappeared; someone working on the site caught onto it, or maybe it was just a glitch that was being exploited in a weird and unpredictable way.
Whatever the specifics in that particular case, this is an evolutionary competition between those building walls and those trying to bypass those walls, and there will be times when there's no obvious way around the paywalls around a given service (I'm not aware of any way around Substack’s paywall right now, for instance).
I also want to make clear that this is ideally a trick that is used alongside paying for content, as too many people accessing work in this way all at once would eventually kill that work—those making it wouldn't be able to afford to continue making it—and I don't think any of us are aiming for that outcome (if you’re angling for unlimited free content, check out what your local library offers, as they tend to have gobs of stuff available and they pay for that content on your behalf).
Instead, this is something akin to the piracy situation back in the Napster days. The received wisdom at the time was to pirate if you needed to (and if you wanted to sample musical work), but to buy albums when possible, and to attend shows and buy merch to support the artists behind the work you were enjoying.
The same applies here: if you enjoy what you're consuming and if you want the folks creating that work to flourish (and bare-minimum, don't want them to have to stop making said work because they can't make a living from it), figure out ways to help them, even if you can't do so directly right at that moment.
Buy a subscription or membership when you're able to in the future, share their work with people who are more likely to be able to afford it, buy something else they make, click on ads, engage with their affiliate partners; there are a lot of free-to-you ways to monetarily support entities you like, even if you can't afford the options most commonly offered via their paywall.
Also keep in mind that this is an ethically blurry aspect of the media world, and that it’s absolutely legitimate to decide against bypassing paywalls, deciding to go without the work you can’t afford to pay for directly.
Do a thorough gut-check, figure out what you’re comfortable doing and not comfortable doing, and one way or another figure out how to help makers-of-things continue making the work in which you’re finding value.
Reads
How to use people to enhance your photography