I want to be able to read the New York Times without a subscription too, yet here we are. Corporations don't have to give all their services to us for free. They can charge, require free registration, whatever.

NYT pays people to write its content, but Twitter users post their content for free.

People is giving content for free to Twitter. Should they start charging for it? Twitter is not on the same league as the NYT.

That doesn’t make the rock-and-hard-place point apply to that situation though, which is what the comment you replied to was a reply to.

It's not you. It's scraper bots they are trying to protect against.