Because I'm not interested in the medium itself, as I would be with a Netflix show; I'm not even interested really in the article or the New York Times as an institution. I'm interested in discussing the supposed real-life phenomenon being covered, and the posted content is the primer for that discussion. I think if you get rid of the archive links on HN you need to ban the paywalled content as well. If you want to discuss paywalled content I'm sure you can do that in the article's comment section.