If it takes 120 seconds to read a newspaper article, the archive.is workflow is a significant overhead over that, a significant friction. Those links are a courtesy to other HN readers. This is very different from the economics of buying and reading a book.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."

edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of "just pay for the article", but: last I read, it's half an hour of work to cancel a New York Times subscription [0]. So, that option's not even on the table.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 ("Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it", 812 comments)