The average HNer will know to do this but the majority of the internet won't. So they'll likely have the effect they want (reducing the number of unpaid pageviews) and a bunch of side-effects they don't want (drastically reducing their relevance as a source of information on the web)

[Edit: Grammar]

I was surprised at a family gathering recently how many of my in-laws reach the paywall and then clear their cookies. Even non-techies can work around the paywall.

You can also listen to NPR without donating.

In the documentary "Page One", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787777/, the then executive editor of the NY Times said that they were basically adopting the NPR model: people who like it will pay for it.

That wasn't the executive editor of the NYT, that was Clay Shirky, the news-should-be-free guru. (Referenced here: http://www.sundance.org/festival/article/qa-page-one-a-year-...)

He wasn't speaking on behalf of the Times, he was speaking as an observer who is pretty firmly against pay walls. If you asked someone at the Times what their pay wall is, they'd say its the good old retail news model: Asking customers to pay money for your product.

If you disable javascript on the site you don't even need to ever bother with cookies. This prevents some multimedia parts of the site from working, but you can read all you want.

or just press "escape" as the page loads