It could be framed as a bug or an enhancement and either way shouldn’t impact the treatment (beyond triage/priority).

It absolutely changes priority and how it's treated. Bugs are things that are actively broken, meaning specifically that the functionality already exists, but it is non-functional/broken. Bugs are prioritized obviously because something that should be working is not.

You are asking for an enhancement, which should be prioritized by dozens of factors, namely who wants this, how does it stack up against other things that other people want, how much effort will it take, and how much of a change would it be, just to name a few. We are not a part of that process, but you can submit a request on GitHub. Doing it here means pretty much nothing, unless you link the GitHub task and ask people to vote for it.

Or, you can write it yourself and submit a PR, making a write up on why you did it, why you think it's useful, and why it should be accepted into the upstream, and then the maintainers can choose to include it or not, again based on theirs and the community feedback.

We developers aren't "splitting hairs", we've seen this trick from crappy PMs dozens of times. Half baked feature requests disguised as bugs. We all see right through it. You want a feature, then get the buy in and go through the necessary steps like everyone else, but don't treat us as morons who will fall for your obvious " well it should work the way I want it to, thus it's a bug" b.s.

You just identified the fallacy yourself.

Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.

90+% of the time, using reader mode will bypass paywalls anyway.

Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.

It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies, so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.

Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.

edit: it’s also worth pointing out that if some people contributing links happen to be subscribers to a news source, as a subscriber they won’t necessarily know that a certain article is paywalled for everyone else, until they share it and someone who isn’t a subscriber gets the notice.

Archive.org doesn't really "get away with it." They face frequent lawsuits and have a steady stream of donations to fight them, along with enough staff to handle responding to takedown demands etc. That isn't true of most Lemmy instances.

I mean, does archive.org get away with it, though?

They have legal troubles not infrequently and they've lost at least one copyright case that I know of recently.

I doubt if you pooled all the Lemmy instances' resources that they'd have the resources to fight a copyright case.

And do I really have to spell out how Google gets away with caching stuff?

Finally, "fair use" isn't magic words that magically absolve you of any liability in all copyright claims. I'm extremely skeptical fair use could be twisted to our defense in this particular case.