There is nothing more annoying on social media than links to website articles that are behind a paywall. If the user who posted it does not use a "gift" link, you typically can't read the article unless you pay. Sometimes, copying the link to a private browser window works, but more companies are using other methods to block that too.
You can also use this to access previous versions of any page (that is archived multiple times).
If it's a site you read a lot, get a subscription! Use this for sites you would not read normally, where someone said "read this".
The solution: Read an archived version of the site. There are a number of "Internet Archive sites" that make it easy to read archived versions of the article, using a simple URL format of [archive domain]/article URL. Note: in my tests, you need a clean URL, not one with tracking links tacked on the end.
Note: Not all articles are available in internet archives.
To bypass the paywall, you can paste the link in manually or you can create a bookmarklet (a JavaScript bookmark) in your browser favorites.
The exact steps to create a bookmarklet depends on your browser.
1. The easiest: right click on the Favorites bar and choose Add this page to Favorites (or Add Page, Add Bookmark) then edit the name and URL. Note, in Edge, you need to click More button to edit the URL.
2. Edit the name then paste this JavaScript in the URL line field:
javascript: (() => { const destination = "https://archive.is/"; { window.open(destination + document.location.href); }})();
3. Save.
To use: when an article you want to read has a paywall, click the bookmarklet to bring up an archived version.
If the URL has a tracking like, it's unlikely the page will be found in the archive. toy remove the tracking, use this instead. It removes the tracking portion. Note: if the part after the ? includes the page, this will not work.
javascript: (() => { const destination = "https://archive.is/"; { window.open(destination + window.location.href.split("?")[0]); }})();