[_lqaf]

1) I'm going to guess that the count of independent bloggers whose primary income derives from their blog is, at best, in the three digit range.

2) I can't speak for others, but paywalls have convinced me to give money to zero entities. I do subscribe to a couple, but making me delete my cookies was not their sales tactic.

3) Completely aside from all that, none of this says anything about HN, and is worth discussion. If I post a link to one of the sites I subscribe to with a larger price tag, where's the line? At what point does it damage conversation? I wonder if, on average, there's less discussion of paywalled links, or if the participant pool is different.

Just as one datapoint, I think Google News should not include WSJ links in the default feed. It is nothing but an ad, which is ironic considering the rest of news.google.com is ad-free.