Most Americans don’t subscribe the the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Talking Points Memo, or your local newspaper. This means that most shared links are inaccessible to people. Gift links let you work around this.
This means that when you share a regular link to those articles, people who want to access the article need to do something unusual to bypass the paywall, such as looking up the article on web.archive.org. This naturally results in essentially nobody reading the article.
Many newspapers have a limited-use sharing feature you can use to get around this problem: a gift link. You’re allowed to do this a limited number of times each month: the New York Times gives you 10 over a 30-day period, the Washington Post gives you 10 in a calendar month, and other platforms have similar rules.
Gift links let people access the article, typically for two weeks or so after you generate them, on an unlimited basis. Non-subscribers get to click through, and just see it frictionlessly. They can reshare the link, and others can see it. This naturally results in a lot more engagement, and a lot more edification.
So folks, when sharing something you want people to actually read, use a fucking gift link.