We allow paywalls that have workarounds. Workaround means people can read it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
The reason we don't disallow all paywalls, but only the ones that have no workaround, is that HN would be much worse off without stories from the NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and many others. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...