The Washington Post recently started asking for an email address in order to access free articles. You can make up any string which starts with a letter, put @gmail.com at the end, and give them that; they don’t check that you have access to the email account.
Or you can do minimal effort and just put archive.ph in front of any link to search. There’s also 12ft.io which works similarly.
https://archive.ph/https://wapo.st/4clZGnF
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://wapo.st/4clZGnF
Providing the canonical links to articles is one of many steps that helps combat misinformation by ensuring the sources of headlines are immediately apparent.
“Astronaut lands on moon, finds it really is made of cheese”
Source: archive.ph/abcdefg
Just scrolling through a feed, is that from a reputable source or some garbage site? Impossible to tell since the source is obfuscated behind an archive link. People don’t always read articles and just take the headline and source as a tidbit of information, so having the source apparent at least provides context for the credibility of the headline.
Edit: Ok, the wa.po shortened link does complicate that a bit, but if you copy the full link once it resolves, you can put archive.ph or 12ft.io in front of it and bob’s your uncle.
It really depends on how much you want to encourage engagement on a post. Ever since forever people have complained that folks in the comments clearly didn’t read the article, so when comments complain about a paywall you can A) do what OP did and describe the multiple steps each individual reader can take to access the article or B) link to archive when you make the post in the first place. Commenters complaining of a “paywall” are usually remarking on easy/immediate accessibility, not on whether it’s free or not.
Frankly any effort is too much effort to read The Washington Post