Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

niemanlab.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 130 posts

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#71

Post by lo_zamoyski »

overfeed wrote: post #51
poisonfountain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is trying to push for that, but every time it's mentioned people complain (because they hate Cloudflare for making them wait 2s for a captcha) and nobody proposes an alternative solution. I don't think this is going to happen, unfortunately, and the internet will get silo-ed into oblivion.

People don't hate micropayments because it's Cloudflare promoting them, it's because it truly is a shit idea, for many reasons. People would equally reject Netflix, if Netflix fooated the idea of replacing the subscription model with pay-per-view micropayments. > ...nobody proposes an alternative solution Such is the human condition - some problems simply have no satisfactory solutions.

> People would equally reject Netflix, if Netflix fooated the idea of replacing the subscription model with pay-per-view micropayments.

You sure about that?

Something like over half of Netflix viewers believe their subscription isn't justified by how much they watch or else they aren't sure of it. Less than half believe the subscription cost is justified.

Whether a PPV model would actually be cheaper for the first half is a good question, but it is possible. Certainly, in my case, I do not watch $20 worth of content on Netflix a month. I would gladly take PPV.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#72

Post by O1111OOO »

Newspapers are failing at an astounding rate. Archive.org is just a (poor) scapegoat for their inability to survive. This makes the point everyone else is making even more important - that those stories need to be archived before they are lost for all time.

"Since the early 2000s, the U.S. has lost about 40% of its local newspapers and about 75% of the jobs in newspaper journalism, according to a 2025 report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. A study published last year by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack shows that in 2002, there were roughly 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States. Today, it’s down to about eight journalists."[0]

[0] https://theconversation.com/why-the-pittsburgh-post-gazettes...

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#73

Post by NicuCalcea »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #54

There's an incredibly simple fix: block the archive for a week. No one is paying after a week, so you let the Archive access after that. I don't see why every news outlet doesn't just do this.

The article is about AI companies using the Internet Archive to source training data, not about people using it to avoid paywalls. AI companies don't care that the data is one week old.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#74

Post by deepfriedbits »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #54

There's an incredibly simple fix: block the archive for a week. No one is paying after a week, so you let the Archive access after that. I don't see why every news outlet doesn't just do this.

It's not about the paywall in this case. It's to prevent AI companies from scraping a publication's archives for training data. If AI companies want that data, they can compensate publishers, not extract it for free from the Internet Archive.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#75

Post by nightshift1 »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #54

There's an incredibly simple fix: block the archive for a week. No one is paying after a week, so you let the Archive access after that. I don't see why every news outlet doesn't just do this.

Good idea, but only if the article can't be edited during that week. What's worth preserving is the version the audience actually read. Articles routinely get ninja-edited after publication, sometimes repeatedly. Changelogs should be mandatory but they're useless if we can't keep them honest.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#76

Post by empath75 »

O1111OOO wrote: post #72

Newspapers are failing at an astounding rate. Archive.org is just a (poor) scapegoat for their inability to survive. This makes the point everyone else is making even more important - that those stories need to be archived before they are lost for all time. "Since the early 2000s, the U.S. has lost about 40% of its local newspapers and about 75% of the jobs in newspaper journalism, according to a 2025 report from the…

There is a future where AI companies start hiring their own reporters, and it might be sooner rather than later.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#77

Post by svachalek »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64
svachalek wrote: post #4

There really should be a micropayments setup on the internet that's not advertising based. Let these models pay a nickel to read the article, covered by the multi trillion dollar AI blank check.

The biggest problem with micropayments is that the buyer needs to be anonymous or you'll be creating a massive surveillance apparatus, which is the thing we're trying to get rid of. But existing laws make it difficult to build something like that which is easy for normies to use, so someone either needs to come up with a creative solution or reform the laws.

Well my thought is in this case the buyer is OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#78

Post by svachalek »

overfeed wrote: post #51
poisonfountain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is trying to push for that, but every time it's mentioned people complain (because they hate Cloudflare for making them wait 2s for a captcha) and nobody proposes an alternative solution. I don't think this is going to happen, unfortunately, and the internet will get silo-ed into oblivion.

People don't hate micropayments because it's Cloudflare promoting them, it's because it truly is a shit idea, for many reasons. People would equally reject Netflix, if Netflix fooated the idea of replacing the subscription model with pay-per-view micropayments. > ...nobody proposes an alternative solution Such is the human condition - some problems simply have no satisfactory solutions.

I'm absolutely the opposite. I'd do a reasonable pay per view on Netflix, but I don't want 73 different streaming subscriptions draining my account every month.

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#79

Post by Terr_ »

horacemorace wrote: post #33
remus wrote: post #15

That's a real shame. I am involved with some history-related projects and the number of websites which go offline is huge, and the wayback machine is incredibly helpful for unearthing these dead sites. It is not hard to imagine a future in 50 years time where a huge percentage of this content is lost forever, or at best incredibly hard to find.

This future is here already, policy makers have it locked up. Any person who remembers what microfiche is understands the magnitude of this problem of not having a trustworthy public record. If we extended public policy from the library era, the library of congress itself would be the Internet Archive.

> If we extended public policy from

Similarly and tangentially, when the US Constitution was made in an era of horseback/carriages, it explicitly authorized the creation of a public national postal service (USPS).

If we extended that older public policy with today's technological context, they would have authorized a national Internet Service Provider. (And, like with USPS, specialized private competitors would exist.)

Re: News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

#80

Post by iamnothere »

fsflover wrote: post #50
RobRivera wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor is a honeypot run my government intel operations. Don't use it.

How about I2P?

All privacy is an illusion, the government can read your thoughts, your neighbors are secretly informants, etc etc.

Tor is fine especially for onion sites. You just have to understand the limitations.

(I2P is also good.)

Post reply on HN