6 ms·
Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
- tracker1 6mo agoTin hat on... I can't help but think that part of it is that they like being able to make stealth edits and pretend earlier versions of articles never existed.
- someperson 6mo agoMaybe they should have an escrow like Financial Times is available on NewsBank service with a 30 day escrow
- righthand 6mo agoWouldn’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).
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> 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?
- sublinear 6mo agoMedia 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.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> 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/ https://www.semrush.com/website/archive.org/overview/ [2] https://www.semrush.com/website/nytimes.com/overview/ https://www.semrush.com/website/nytimes.com/overview/
- sublinear 6mo agoYes and citations are a matter of quality, not quantity. The whole point of archiving is so that people can review it later. People living in the future are the vast majority of readership (and no they didn't pay for it). The article's place in historical context is far more important than the paper itself. Writing that stands the test of time and that gets cited frequently is where all the authority and credibility comes from. It's absurd that the NYT of all places can be this boneheaded, but I guess it's a sign of the times.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo agoif 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.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo agoPeople 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%.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- LNSY 6mo ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoI 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.
- themafia 6mo ago> 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.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Wouldn't that benefit you either way? I’m not in journalism. Becoming relevant down the road would benefit the journal, but they’d also want to get the views in case it converts into subscriptions. Hence the pull limit. > the underlying spirit of journalism The places that ignore the business of journalism cable fund the fight true journalism requires. To the extent I think there is a betrayal of fundamentals, it’s in the papers who went with free content driven by ads.
- areoform 6mo agoNot 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.
- xyzzy_plugh 6mo agoThe 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.
- ameliaquining 6mo agoAs 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.
- redwall_hp 6mo agoExactly. 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.
- layman51 6mo agoI 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.
- Barbing 6mo agoArchives protect truth
- ctippett 6mo agoAm 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.
- cmeacham98 6mo agoCorrect. Example snippet from the nytimes.com robots.txt: User-agent: archive.org_bot Disallow: /
- joecool1029 6mo agoWhich 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.
- socalgal2 6mo agorobots.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
- keane 6mo agoThe <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/Elements/meta/name/robots 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.
- kr108sdh 6mo agoThe 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.
- sublinear 6mo agoAfter 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.
- giwook 6mo agoAnd by what standards have you determined that these outlets are circling the drain? The work of independent journalists is more important than ever before.
- beej71 6mo agoMore important than ever before and less market value than ever before. :(
- monkaiju 6mo agoAre we considering the NYT and USA Today "independent journalism" still? Seems dubious...
- giwook 6mo agoI 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.
- rmunn 6mo agoThat 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).
- Cider9986 6mo agoI am looking forward to this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070516)
- WarmWash 6mo agoCan 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.
- 32sGqt 6mo ago[dead]
- shimman 6mo agoHow 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!).
- kmoser 6mo ago> 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.
- goosejuice 6mo agoI'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.
- WarmWash 6mo agoA 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?
- ajaimk 6mo agoIdea: allow scraping but can’t publish for 1 year?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoAnd find a litigation pool so the Archive can ensure LLMs crawling it contribute back.
- neop1x 6mo agoThat actually sounds like a cool idea! If only they would allow at least this.
- someperson 5mo agoYes, it's called an escrow
- eranation 6mo agoI 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.
- gblargg 6mo agoWould you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy? I doubt it.
- glitcher 6mo agoI would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?
- Permit 6mo agoBlendle, 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.
- suddenlybananas 6mo agoHow much do they charge per article? If it's above 10 cents or so, I can't imagine it being a reasonable price.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> 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.
- JustinGoldberg9 6mo agoNeed a cryptographically verifiable internet archive. This is probably not possible without something like web 3 or nostr or gpg pgp. Idk.
- grebc 6mo ago[flagged]
- armchairhacker 6mo agoMany unrelated archives would be good enough
- karel-3d 6mo agoCan'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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- crowcroft 6mo agoOk, but what about Meta and X etc.
- karel-3d 6mo agoThere is still archive.today, too bad the owner is crazy
- shevy-java 6mo agoWe 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.
- drivingmenuts 6mo agoWhat 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.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> 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.
- keybored 6mo agoChomsky 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.)
- switzer 6mo agoI 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.
- m101 6mo agoIsn't it true that the more people that sign this petition serves to increase the case for the NYT to not be allowing access to archive.org (as many have said - most people only care because it allows them to circumvent paywalls)?
- akashwadhwani35 5mo agoWayback Machine is a crucial part of the internet