I think the problem is that when Archive.org has access to NYT and other publisher content, people can scrape NYT content at scale from Archive.org even when they cannot do so directly on NYT. If Archive.org blocks scrapers, maybe the publishers would make different choices and allow Archive.org access.
Am I correct that this has come about because archive.org respects robots.txt and these sites have blocked their crawler from indexing their sites?
I'm not sure how to articulate my thoughts on this exactly, other than to say it's disappointing that doing the right thing (i.e. respecting robots.txt) is rewarded with the burden of soliciting responses to a petition while at the same time others are rewarded with profit for ignoring those same directives.
Don't know if it helps your musings at all, but there's a good chance that if a high-profile crawler like archive.org disrespected their robots.txt, that archive.org would be faced with lawsuits (or some other form of pressure). This is not merely the most moral move; rather it is the only sensible move.
The only reason "others are rewarded with profit" in cases like these are because pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating.
Fair point. Being small and shadowy is a sufficient condition to avoid litigation, but not a necessary one. Another sufficient condition is having billions of dollars to throw around. Unfortunately, archive.org is well known, well loved, and fundamentally harmless.
Which they don’t respect. I’ve had it for my blog for years and they still added it to wayback machine, see my last comment for their official announcement of the ignore robots.txt policy, it is not new.
robots.txt means they shouldn't auto-scan your site. Any user though can go to the wayback machine and type in a URL and the wayback machine will read that URL. That was the intent of robots.txt (don't scan) not (don't read period). It's spelled out in the spec for robots.txt
Aren't you choosing to ignore something very specific specified in that article? Why do you make it seem that article implies it's their overall policy?
> A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to info@archive.org).
> Aren't you choosing to ignore something very specific specified in that article?
Of course not, did you ignore the lines right after? “As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly.”
The announcement is from 9 years ago. I already mentioned they ignored the robots.txt for my own blog.
LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.
This is like arguing that services can't provide access to libraries that provide public WiFi because it would give the public legal permission to pirate TV shows. They're two unrelated things. And then some members of the public argue that they're making fair use rather than pirating anything, but that still has nothing to do with the library.
But as I understand it, the Web Archive does respect robots.txt, while LLM scrapers absolutely do not and use all sorts of dodgy methods to get around it already...
The actual root cause is that we're allowing LLM companies to completely disregard copyright laws for their profit. Whether the LLM companies scrape the Web Archive or the original source doesn't change the copyright infringement implications in any way, and cutting off the web archive doesn't practically change anything (because as I understand, LLM scraping is already prolific all over the web).
Is there a case that actually says this? Why would whether something is fair use depend on that? For that matter, how would they even show that a given AI model was trained on something from a recursive crawler rather than the same articles added to the training data after being downloaded by hand?
You can call it whatever you want but it’s killing journalism when LLMs can automatically scrape and reword all the news. Sucking up the profits without contributing anything back to the people who created the work.
The general problem here is that as soon as something is news, there will be not only numerous articles about it from multiple publications but also discussion of it on social media.
Which means LLMs have a zillion sources to get the story. Removing any given subset isn't going to prevent it from having the information in the training data, all it does is prevent that subset from being archived for future humans.
A bunch of people who have haven't ever loaded an ad or paid a subscription to those organizations are going to make a stand to demand they leave their backdoor open?
I know a little about this debate on the Times and Atlantic sides. I’ll get some grief for this, but I asked a senior person at the former what they thought about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
In the end, we settled on agreeing that making such stuff available after 30 days, and possibly with access restrictions (can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future) struck the right balance.
To my knowledge, the Internet Archive hasn’t done any outreach on this issue. In addition to pressuring the publications, I’d put some pressure on them to negotiate.
This seems like a nice compromise. The news orgs get to keep the initial flurry of page views while the free information/universal library role of the Internet is maintained. But still those magazines will want to control their back catalogues. They currently sell access to libraries/universities. And as many on HN suggest, some of those news orgs would like to change/update stories without a publicly available "revision history".
I would be glad if these “news” sites weren’t posted to HN at all. If the article is true and worth discussing, it will be reported by a more reputable organization (e.g. Reuters) or it’s a primary source that should be posted directly (sometimes the source is posted then a news article covering it is posted later, I don’t know why both aren’t merged).
Too often they’ve been caught selectively reporting details and quotes, or reporting facts from an unreliable source that turned out to be outright false. In the latter case they quietly retract the article, so most readers continue believing the lie (maybe that’s why they don’t want to be archived).
Even posting a small blog is better, while it can also be biased and untrustworthy, if it has original thought, supports an individual, and doesn’t have ads. Although the amount of obvious LLM blogs submitted here is another issue.
> if the article is true and worth discussing, it will be reported by a more reputable organization (e.g. Reuters) or it’s a primary source that should be posted directly
The primary source of investigative journalism is the newspaper.
Yes, but sometimes they paraphrase an article from a different news organization, and other times they’re not trustworthy.
If a NY Times article is corroborated or even paraphrased itself by a more trustworthy organization, or has direct links to multiple primary sources, I wouldn’t mind. Except the NY Times article is still paywalled, and there may be a source that’s not, in which case I still think that source should be submitted instead.
Both should be submitted. I’m going to upvote the better source. Which more often than not, is the one that predominantly pays itself from subscribers versus ads.
> can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future
In case it "becomes relevant." Wouldn't that benefit you either way? It makes you wonder if they have a dashboard of unfortunate digital statistics on display somewhere and worship of these numbers have replaced the underlying spirit of journalism.
Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.
It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.
The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.
In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.
I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.
I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.
> patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit
Maybe. The alternative is most people simply aren’t going to engage with long-form journalism. Keeping the analysis behind subscriptions while video summaries make ad revenue on YouTube and Twitter might be the best fit.
A pie chart showing the times I used the wayback machine to read an old NYT article vs the times I visited it due to a highly upvoted top HN comment linking to a relatively new article so we all can bypass the paywall is a solid circle.
Blendle, Scroll, Flattr and several others have attempted this. It turns out no consumer actually wants to do this, it’s primarily an idea that’s invoked on HackerNews to defend not subscribing to journalism while using ad blockers, it’s not a real business model.
> Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy?
That’s how I signed up to The Atlantic. I wanted to read the Signalgate reporting. There are other publications which get upvoted here frequently that have the paywall workarounds. I generally click around their paywall.
What is the advantage to those organizations to have their work preserved? If their work is stored in a public archive, they can’t charge for it and they lose money. If they make a mistake, then history is what they say it is and there is no external record to say otherwise.
> What is the advantage to those organizations to have their work preserved?
It becomes a research resource. It also creates a high-friction interface for potential subscribers.
I wound up subscribing to Le Monde Diplo because of a HN comment referencing a paywalled article. I didn't want to sign up just for one article. So I bypassed using one of the circumvention sites (I think outline was popular then). The article was compelling enough that I signed up for the paper, and remain subscribed to this day.
Chomsky one time was talking about, gosh, his eyes are too old to be reading this microformat thing with a magnifier at the library in order to research archived newspapers like The (New York) Times. (This was sometime in the 90’s.)
We are kind of losing the world wide web here or at the least part of how we could use it in the past. More and more key services get knocked out; see the associated rise of age snifing and the campaign to destroy VPNs.
After many years of these media outlets circling the drain, this is likely the clearest signal of their irrelevance. It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
I don't know about USA Today. NYT at least seems independent if left leaning. I've not seen them be unfairly biased or bend over backwards to cater to outside corporate interests just yet. They're certainly not bending the knee to the current administration.
They have a robust paying subscriber base that supports them and don't have an owner whose last name rhymes with Pesos who can axe a story just because he doesn't like what it says.
That a Democrat-leaning paper would criticize Republican politicians is not surprising. A better test of independence would be whether they criticize Democratic politicians (when they do things deserving criticism, that is: I don't expect them to criticize policy positions that they agree with, but all politicians do some things, in some cases many things, deserving of criticism).
The petition should be to ban the AI theft. If it is on wayback, the bots could as well scrape the NYT directly.
The NYT is of course guilty itself. It did not investigate the possible murder of its star witness Suchir Balaji and is too reserved in examining the consequences of AI in general.
If they don't fulfill their journalistic and societal obligations, soon its own journalists will be replaced by AI bullet point slop like Axios.
Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
I'm grown up now, I understand how things work, and I'd rather see Tide and Coke ads than pay $20/mo to 8 different orgs, while maintaining that ad free option for those who want it.
The children of the internet probably won't sign a truce, so let's just cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
I'm a paying NYT subscriber for years. NYT has a ton of ads, even for subscribers. They don't offer an ad free version despite it being totally viable at a few more bucks a month based on their finances. Their ads are super disruptive to reading and their privacy policy appears to indicate they buy and sell your data.
I dunno. That seems like a pretty big fuck you to a paying customer already when all they have to do is provide a sub for a few more bucks a month. But I guess I'm a child of the Internet.
How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
How much faster would consumer software be if adware was made illegal? How much faster would our devices be if we didn't have half the code base supporting malware?
Acting like an ad enabled internet was the only option is extremely foolish, especially when the ad enabled internet was fully chosen and pushed onto the public by very specific people (thanks Newt Gingrich!).
> How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
That era vastly predates the Internet, let alone the (relatively) ad-free pre-1980s Internet, neither of which we can return to in any meaningful fashion.
> Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
Nope, two problems
1- Ads is privacy issue not only convenience issue. Targeted ads should not normalized.
2- Companies figures out that even paying doesn't means you don't get ads. You probably are bigger target with more disposable income than average in such case.
I'm fine with ads as long as they are integrated with the page. What I hate is the typical Google Adsense garbage where the same ad is plastered in 4 different places on the page, with a video ad playing in the corner, and if you're lucky, a popup ad as well.
Wouldn’t it be better to let these legacy news orgs (which aren’t really anything beyond advertising and data harvesting firms) block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under? I’m struggling to think of a reason I need NY Times. I’ve never had a subscription and never seen writing that I thought benefited me as a citizen (they’re Very pro-war of any kind).
Media influence and authority has historically depended on getting cited by writing that is more directly relevant to the reader's concern (i.e. the topic of research).
The paywalls were one thing, but disallowing archival is practically suicide.
if people are reading the articles through wayback, then they aren't making any money because no data is harvested and no click-thrus or impressions or whatever the metric is are registered.
People are willing to post links to paywalled articles when there are ways for people not currently inclined to subscribe to read them. Even if 97% of the current non-subscribers bypass the paywall, having 3% become subscribers is very useful, especially if they become recurring subscribers.
If posting the link instead implies that the 97% of people not currently willing to subscribe can't read it, then people instead post a link to a publication their audience can read, in which case the first publication gets actually 0%.
The title freaked me out. I thought this was about the Wayback Machine going away but no, it's just news publications blocking being archived.
I guess I don't really care. As soon as it becomes unworkable to view these publications through archivers I'll just stop viewing them altogether. I don't see this helping their bottom line though.
As long as other people are reading them, they're important for understanding what's happening in the world and what information the public is getting, which is why we need an accessible archive of their content.
Exactly. Libraries have kept microfiche archives of newspapers for forever, and they're an essential part of historical research.
They also preserved old books. But now I guess they're becoming middlemen for access to limited ebook platforms that ensure books disappear when publishers lose interest.
The "Information Age" is proving to be the setup for a dark age, when nonprofitable things are just thrown out and efforts to preserve them are actively fought.
I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.
I think the problem is that when Archive.org has access to NYT and other publisher content, people can scrape NYT content at scale from Archive.org even when they cannot do so directly on NYT. If Archive.org blocks scrapers, maybe the publishers would make different choices and allow Archive.org access.
Am I correct that this has come about because archive.org respects robots.txt and these sites have blocked their crawler from indexing their sites?
I'm not sure how to articulate my thoughts on this exactly, other than to say it's disappointing that doing the right thing (i.e. respecting robots.txt) is rewarded with the burden of soliciting responses to a petition while at the same time others are rewarded with profit for ignoring those same directives.
Don't know if it helps your musings at all, but there's a good chance that if a high-profile crawler like archive.org disrespected their robots.txt, that archive.org would be faced with lawsuits (or some other form of pressure). This is not merely the most moral move; rather it is the only sensible move.
The only reason "others are rewarded with profit" in cases like these are because pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating.
>pinkie-promise-style obligations don't affect players too small or shadowy to bother litigating
I think you're looking at the wrong end of the spectrum there. It's some of the biggest players who flaunt the rules.
"Several AI companies said to be ignoring robots dot txt exclusion, scraping content without permission: report" (2024) https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Fair point. Being small and shadowy is a sufficient condition to avoid litigation, but not a necessary one. Another sufficient condition is having billions of dollars to throw around. Unfortunately, archive.org is well known, well loved, and fundamentally harmless.
Side note: You probably mean "flout" instead of "flaunt."
Correct. Example snippet from the nytimes.com robots.txt:
Which they don’t respect. I’ve had it for my blog for years and they still added it to wayback machine, see my last comment for their official announcement of the ignore robots.txt policy, it is not new.
robots.txt means they shouldn't auto-scan your site. Any user though can go to the wayback machine and type in a URL and the wayback machine will read that URL. That was the intent of robots.txt (don't scan) not (don't read period). It's spelled out in the spec for robots.txt
The <meta name="robots"> tag and robots.txt serve different roles: robots.txt controls crawling, while the robots meta tag influences indexing and other behavior. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I wonder how archive.org_bot behaves when <meta name="robots" content="noindex, noarchive, nocache" /> is present.
> I’ve had it for my blog for years
Just out of curiosity, why don't you want your public blog archived? not questioning, just trying to understand the logic/motivations?
Also, I think you're being unfairly downvoted.
No, archive.org does NOT respect robots.txt. You need to reach out to them directly and ask your site not be included: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
Aren't you choosing to ignore something very specific specified in that article? Why do you make it seem that article implies it's their overall policy?
> A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to info@archive.org).
> Aren't you choosing to ignore something very specific specified in that article?
Of course not, did you ignore the lines right after? “As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly.”
The announcement is from 9 years ago. I already mentioned they ignored the robots.txt for my own blog.
It's the same idiocy that DRM created.
Be a pirate, because a pirate is free...
It's because they want to restrict AI companies from stealing content, but they can't do it if internet archive proxies it all for them.
All of the LLMs would be massively less useful if it wasn't for scraping the latest news.
LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.
> LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
What's the conclusion from this train if thought? Just because some burglars can pick locks doesn't mean you should leave your front door unlocked.
Locking a door (or robots.txt) is how one can establish mens rea for those who bypass the barrier.
This is like arguing that services can't provide access to libraries that provide public WiFi because it would give the public legal permission to pirate TV shows. They're two unrelated things. And then some members of the public argue that they're making fair use rather than pirating anything, but that still has nothing to do with the library.
But as I understand it, the Web Archive does respect robots.txt, while LLM scrapers absolutely do not and use all sorts of dodgy methods to get around it already...
The actual root cause is that we're allowing LLM companies to completely disregard copyright laws for their profit. Whether the LLM companies scrape the Web Archive or the original source doesn't change the copyright infringement implications in any way, and cutting off the web archive doesn't practically change anything (because as I understand, LLM scraping is already prolific all over the web).
The legal implications would be different vs scraping publicly available content.
Is there a case that actually says this? Why would whether something is fair use depend on that? For that matter, how would they even show that a given AI model was trained on something from a recursive crawler rather than the same articles added to the training data after being downloaded by hand?
There was a similar case where a web scraper was bypassing prevention mechanisms on linked in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
That case seems to imply the opposite?
"stealing" is BS because the original still exists. Copyright infringement is more correct.
they're stealing page views
You can call it whatever you want but it’s killing journalism when LLMs can automatically scrape and reword all the news. Sucking up the profits without contributing anything back to the people who created the work.
The general problem here is that as soon as something is news, there will be not only numerous articles about it from multiple publications but also discussion of it on social media.
Which means LLMs have a zillion sources to get the story. Removing any given subset isn't going to prevent it from having the information in the training data, all it does is prevent that subset from being archived for future humans.
Idea: allow scraping but can’t publish for 1 year?
And find a litigation pool so the Archive can ensure LLMs crawling it contribute back.
Maybe they should have an escrow like Financial Times is available on NewsBank service with a 30 day escrow
A bunch of people who have haven't ever loaded an ad or paid a subscription to those organizations are going to make a stand to demand they leave their backdoor open?
I am looking forward to this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070516)
Need a cryptographically verifiable internet archive. This is probably not possible without something like web 3 or nostr or gpg pgp. Idk.
Many unrelated archives would be good enough
Can't the archive publish the SSL signatures of all the requests or something?
You can cryptographically verify a timestamp though by piggybacking on bitcoin like opentimestamps do.
> Idk.
Yeah.
I know a little about this debate on the Times and Atlantic sides. I’ll get some grief for this, but I asked a senior person at the former what they thought about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
In the end, we settled on agreeing that making such stuff available after 30 days, and possibly with access restrictions (can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future) struck the right balance.
To my knowledge, the Internet Archive hasn’t done any outreach on this issue. In addition to pressuring the publications, I’d put some pressure on them to negotiate.
This seems like a nice compromise. The news orgs get to keep the initial flurry of page views while the free information/universal library role of the Internet is maintained. But still those magazines will want to control their back catalogues. They currently sell access to libraries/universities. And as many on HN suggest, some of those news orgs would like to change/update stories without a publicly available "revision history".
I would be glad if these “news” sites weren’t posted to HN at all. If the article is true and worth discussing, it will be reported by a more reputable organization (e.g. Reuters) or it’s a primary source that should be posted directly (sometimes the source is posted then a news article covering it is posted later, I don’t know why both aren’t merged).
Too often they’ve been caught selectively reporting details and quotes, or reporting facts from an unreliable source that turned out to be outright false. In the latter case they quietly retract the article, so most readers continue believing the lie (maybe that’s why they don’t want to be archived).
Even posting a small blog is better, while it can also be biased and untrustworthy, if it has original thought, supports an individual, and doesn’t have ads. Although the amount of obvious LLM blogs submitted here is another issue.
> if the article is true and worth discussing, it will be reported by a more reputable organization (e.g. Reuters) or it’s a primary source that should be posted directly
The primary source of investigative journalism is the newspaper.
Yes, but sometimes they paraphrase an article from a different news organization, and other times they’re not trustworthy.
If a NY Times article is corroborated or even paraphrased itself by a more trustworthy organization, or has direct links to multiple primary sources, I wouldn’t mind. Except the NY Times article is still paywalled, and there may be a source that’s not, in which case I still think that source should be submitted instead.
Both should be submitted. I’m going to upvote the better source. Which more often than not, is the one that predominantly pays itself from subscribers versus ads.
>about the paywall workarounds that are frequent on HN—I was genuinely shocked to learn they hadn’t heard about it.
Is the Internet Archive regularly used as a paywall workaround? Generally it's archive.is, which has no connection to the IA.
Yes, he got that wrong. The IA doesn't remove paywalls.
That's not the point.
Huh? IA not doing what they claim seems fairly important to their point.
> can’t be pulled more than N times a day, in case it becomes relevant in the future
In case it "becomes relevant." Wouldn't that benefit you either way? It makes you wonder if they have a dashboard of unfortunate digital statistics on display somewhere and worship of these numbers have replaced the underlying spirit of journalism.
Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.
It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.
The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.
In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.
I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.
I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.
> patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit
Maybe. The alternative is most people simply aren’t going to engage with long-form journalism. Keeping the analysis behind subscriptions while video summaries make ad revenue on YouTube and Twitter might be the best fit.
Ok, but what about Meta and X etc.
I signed, but let’s be honest.
A pie chart showing the times I used the wayback machine to read an old NYT article vs the times I visited it due to a highly upvoted top HN comment linking to a relatively new article so we all can bypass the paywall is a solid circle.
Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy? I doubt it.
I would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?
Blendle, Scroll, Flattr and several others have attempted this. It turns out no consumer actually wants to do this, it’s primarily an idea that’s invoked on HackerNews to defend not subscribing to journalism while using ad blockers, it’s not a real business model.
How much do they charge per article? If it's above 10 cents or so, I can't imagine it being a reasonable price.
> Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy?
That’s how I signed up to The Atlantic. I wanted to read the Signalgate reporting. There are other publications which get upvoted here frequently that have the paywall workarounds. I generally click around their paywall.
There is still archive.today, too bad the owner is crazy
What is the advantage to those organizations to have their work preserved? If their work is stored in a public archive, they can’t charge for it and they lose money. If they make a mistake, then history is what they say it is and there is no external record to say otherwise.
> What is the advantage to those organizations to have their work preserved?
It becomes a research resource. It also creates a high-friction interface for potential subscribers.
I wound up subscribing to Le Monde Diplo because of a HN comment referencing a paywalled article. I didn't want to sign up just for one article. So I bypassed using one of the circumvention sites (I think outline was popular then). The article was compelling enough that I signed up for the paper, and remain subscribed to this day.
Chomsky one time was talking about, gosh, his eyes are too old to be reading this microformat thing with a magnifier at the library in order to research archived newspapers like The (New York) Times. (This was sometime in the 90’s.)
We are kind of losing the world wide web here or at the least part of how we could use it in the past. More and more key services get knocked out; see the associated rise of age snifing and the campaign to destroy VPNs.
After many years of these media outlets circling the drain, this is likely the clearest signal of their irrelevance. It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
And by what standards have you determined that these outlets are circling the drain?
The work of independent journalists is more important than ever before.
More important than ever before and less market value than ever before. :(
It’s kind of shocking to read what you wrote, and realize those big media brands used to be independent journalism.
Are we considering the NYT and USA Today "independent journalism" still? Seems dubious...
I don't know about USA Today. NYT at least seems independent if left leaning. I've not seen them be unfairly biased or bend over backwards to cater to outside corporate interests just yet. They're certainly not bending the knee to the current administration.
They have a robust paying subscriber base that supports them and don't have an owner whose last name rhymes with Pesos who can axe a story just because he doesn't like what it says.
That a Democrat-leaning paper would criticize Republican politicians is not surprising. A better test of independence would be whether they criticize Democratic politicians (when they do things deserving criticism, that is: I don't expect them to criticize policy positions that they agree with, but all politicians do some things, in some cases many things, deserving of criticism).
> the clearest signal of their irrelevance
NYT had $2.82B in revenue in 2025.
> It's not like anyone is committing these rags to microfiche anymore.
I recommend you actually go and read those fiches. The press was not historically high quality. Mass media has had the same problems for decades.
What it used to have was genuine independent competition.
The petition should be to ban the AI theft. If it is on wayback, the bots could as well scrape the NYT directly.
The NYT is of course guilty itself. It did not investigate the possible murder of its star witness Suchir Balaji and is too reserved in examining the consequences of AI in general.
If they don't fulfill their journalistic and societal obligations, soon its own journalists will be replaced by AI bullet point slop like Axios.
Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
I'm grown up now, I understand how things work, and I'd rather see Tide and Coke ads than pay $20/mo to 8 different orgs, while maintaining that ad free option for those who want it.
The children of the internet probably won't sign a truce, so let's just cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
I'm a paying NYT subscriber for years. NYT has a ton of ads, even for subscribers. They don't offer an ad free version despite it being totally viable at a few more bucks a month based on their finances. Their ads are super disruptive to reading and their privacy policy appears to indicate they buy and sell your data.
I dunno. That seems like a pretty big fuck you to a paying customer already when all they have to do is provide a sub for a few more bucks a month. But I guess I'm a child of the Internet.
Any customer who has the money to pay extra to skip ads is the most valuable customer for the ads to target.
How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
How much faster would consumer software be if adware was made illegal? How much faster would our devices be if we didn't have half the code base supporting malware?
Acting like an ad enabled internet was the only option is extremely foolish, especially when the ad enabled internet was fully chosen and pushed onto the public by very specific people (thanks Newt Gingrich!).
> How about we go back to the era of humanity where modern marketing didn't exist?
That era vastly predates the Internet, let alone the (relatively) ad-free pre-1980s Internet, neither of which we can return to in any meaningful fashion.
>cut them out and let intellectually honest people have a decent internet.
Ah, so, take the money out of it completely? No subscriptions, and no ads? Sounds like a good idea to me.
Would you work for free?
> Can we just go back to ads and normalize blocking people who ad-block?
Nope, two problems
1- Ads is privacy issue not only convenience issue. Targeted ads should not normalized.
2- Companies figures out that even paying doesn't means you don't get ads. You probably are bigger target with more disposable income than average in such case.
We can't - LLMs don't proxy ads.
I'm fine with ads as long as they are integrated with the page. What I hate is the typical Google Adsense garbage where the same ad is plastered in 4 different places on the page, with a video ad playing in the corner, and if you're lucky, a popup ad as well.
Wouldn’t it be better to let these legacy news orgs (which aren’t really anything beyond advertising and data harvesting firms) block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under? I’m struggling to think of a reason I need NY Times. I’ve never had a subscription and never seen writing that I thought benefited me as a citizen (they’re Very pro-war of any kind).
> block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under?
…why would they go under if the people who don’t pay for news stop reading them?
Media influence and authority has historically depended on getting cited by writing that is more directly relevant to the reader's concern (i.e. the topic of research).
The paywalls were one thing, but disallowing archival is practically suicide.
> disallowing archival is practically suicide
The Times alone pulls a multiple of the Internet Archive’s visitors [1][2].
[1] https://www.semrush.com/website/archive.org/overview/
[2] https://www.semrush.com/website/nytimes.com/overview/
if people are reading the articles through wayback, then they aren't making any money because no data is harvested and no click-thrus or impressions or whatever the metric is are registered.
People are willing to post links to paywalled articles when there are ways for people not currently inclined to subscribe to read them. Even if 97% of the current non-subscribers bypass the paywall, having 3% become subscribers is very useful, especially if they become recurring subscribers.
If posting the link instead implies that the 97% of people not currently willing to subscribe can't read it, then people instead post a link to a publication their audience can read, in which case the first publication gets actually 0%.
The title freaked me out. I thought this was about the Wayback Machine going away but no, it's just news publications blocking being archived.
I guess I don't really care. As soon as it becomes unworkable to view these publications through archivers I'll just stop viewing them altogether. I don't see this helping their bottom line though.
As long as other people are reading them, they're important for understanding what's happening in the world and what information the public is getting, which is why we need an accessible archive of their content.
Exactly. Libraries have kept microfiche archives of newspapers for forever, and they're an essential part of historical research.
They also preserved old books. But now I guess they're becoming middlemen for access to limited ebook platforms that ensure books disappear when publishers lose interest.
The "Information Age" is proving to be the setup for a dark age, when nonprofitable things are just thrown out and efforts to preserve them are actively fought.
I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.
Archives protect truth