Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine

https://www.savethearchive.com/newsleaders/

by doener • 2 months ago

435 121 2 months ago

someperson2• 2 months ago

Maybe they should have an escrow like Financial Times is available on NewsBank service with a 30 day escrow

righthand• 2 months ago

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).

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months 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?

sublinear3• 2 months ago

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.

b00ty4breakfast• 2 months ago

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.

AnthonyMouse6• 2 months ago

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%.

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months ago

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.

themafia2• 2 months 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.

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months ago

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.

boomboomsubban2• 2 months ago

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.

frm88• 2 months ago

Yes, he got that wrong. The IA doesn't remove paywalls.

tolerance• 2 months ago

That's not the point.

Wowfunhappy2• 2 months ago

It’s certainly not as common as archive.is, but I’ve seen it done on HN. I even commented at one point something to the effect of “this seems like a great way to get news sites to block the Internet Archive”…

jasonfarnon2• 2 months ago

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".

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months ago

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"

Solution would be to restrict LLMs from training on the archives. Libraries and universities paying for back access is more complicated.

armchairhacker3• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months ago

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.

xyzzy_plugh• 2 months ago

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.

ameliaquining• 2 months ago

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.

redwall_hp• 2 months ago

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.

Barbing• 2 months ago

Archives protect truth

ctippett• 2 months ago

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.

cmeacham98• 2 months ago

Correct. Example snippet from the nytimes.com robots.txt:

    User-agent: archive.org_bot
    Disallow: /

joecool10293• 2 months ago

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.

mjmas• 2 months ago

Is there a difference between that and User-agent: ia_archiver ?

Paracompact2• 2 months ago

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.

GolfPopper2• 2 months ago

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...

Gigachad4• 2 months ago

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.

stephen_g2• 2 months ago

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.

userbinator2• 2 months ago

"stealing" is BS because the original still exists. Copyright infringement is more correct.

switzer2• 2 months ago

LLMs would then license content from news orgs and other publishers, which is what should happen.

joecool10293• 2 months ago

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...

input_sh• 2 months ago

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).

LocalH• 2 months ago

I'd rather they disregard robots.txt than the opposite situation, where someone does not use robots.txt on a domain to allow IA to archive it, then for whatever reason the domain lapsed and got swooped up by a parker who then subsequently adds a robots.txt blocking IA from the whole site, which would have then caused IA to remove all historical archives of that domain from public view.

userbinator2• 2 months ago

It's the same idiocy that DRM created.

Be a pirate, because a pirate is free...

kr108sdh• 2 months ago

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.

sublinear3• 2 months ago

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.

giwook3• 2 months ago

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.

beej71• 2 months ago

More important than ever before and less market value than ever before. :(

monkaiju• 2 months ago

Are we considering the NYT and USA Today "independent journalism" still? Seems dubious...

awakeasleep• 2 months ago

It’s kind of shocking to read what you wrote, and realize those big media brands used to be independent journalism.

weberer• 2 months ago

The work of independent journalists is more important than ever before.

Correct, and they're stealing viewers from these corporate media orgs like NYT. A lot of young people are getting their news from independent journalists on Youtube like Nick Shirley.

themafia2• 2 months ago

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.

ks2048• 2 months ago

the clearest signal of their irrelevance

NYT had $2.82B in revenue in 2025.

Cider9986• 2 months ago

I am looking forward to this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070516)

WarmWash2• 2 months ago

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.

shimman• 2 months ago

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!).

kmoser• 2 months 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.

goosejuice2• 2 months ago

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.

vkou• 2 months ago

Any customer who has the money to pay extra to skip ads is the most valuable customer for the ads to target.

GolfPopper2• 2 months ago

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.

Permit2• 2 months ago

Would you work for free?

chadgpt3• 2 months ago

We can't - LLMs don't proxy ads.

elashri• 2 months ago

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.

platevoltage• 2 months ago

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.

WarmWash2• 2 months ago

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?

ajaimk• 2 months ago

Idea: allow scraping but can’t publish for 1 year?

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months ago

And find a litigation pool so the Archive can ensure LLMs crawling it contribute back.

neop1x• 2 months ago

That actually sounds like a cool idea! If only they would allow at least this.

someperson2• 2 months ago

Yes, it's called an escrow

eranation• 2 months ago

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.

gblargg• 2 months ago

Would you have paid NYT to view the article if there weren't an archived copy? I doubt it.

glitcher• 2 months ago

I would pay a small amount to read one article but I’m not going to subscribe. Who offers that?

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Need a cryptographically verifiable internet archive. This is probably not possible without something like web 3 or nostr or gpg pgp. Idk.

armchairhacker3• 2 months ago

Many unrelated archives would be good enough

karel-3d2• 2 months ago

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.

crowcroft• 2 months ago

Ok, but what about Meta and X etc.

karel-3d2• 2 months ago

There is still archive.today, too bad the owner is crazy

shevy-java• 2 months ago

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.

drivingmenuts• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross12• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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.)

switzer2• 2 months ago

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.

m101• 2 months ago

Isn'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)?

tracker1• 2 months ago

Tin 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.

akashwadhwani35• 2 months ago

Wayback Machine is a crucial part of the internet

Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine

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