Archive.is blog

Since we are a service for latecomers, we have to debunk a couple of myths for latecomers (the list will be updated, and the answers will be supplemented and rewritten, then I will add the results to the FAQ).

1. We need as many users as possible, and they have some value — no, we don’t need them; there are almost always more users than we can serve. The captcha that annoys you — it’s mainly not against bots.
    
2. Paywalls as a selling point — not really.
   
   First, here we’re talking about the West, and that’s far from 100%, and probably not even 50% of users. There’s a lot of Japan and Korea, and there are no paywalls there at all.
   
   Second, some support for news sites only appeared during COVID, because of COVID itself and the demise of projects that actively used the archive (jeuxvideo, taringa, etc.).
   
   Before that, practically all news was archived in an unreadable form, with all the modal pop-ups saying “subscribe to our mailing list” and so on.
   
   When asked to fix it, we replied, “Well, your sites are crap, so we accurately archive them as we see them, and anyway, there’s nothing interesting there. Make normal sites first.”
   
   So, we started cleaning up with COVID, and as it ended, all sorts of moral dilemmas arose, and these are far from just formal issues of legality, copyright, and jurisdiction.
   
   There are also more serious questions, such as whether it is ethical for us to participate in the dissemination of news in the absence of something like COVID?
   
   You may argue that there is a war going on right now (and point to any war), but this is rather a negative example: if the free dissemination of news during COVID can be interpreted as a blessing, many publishers removed their paywalls back then, but it is impossible to explain participation in the dissemination of military propaganda in the same way.
   
   In short, supporting news sites is like carrying a suitcase without a handle: you should drop it, but in the absence of other big categories of users (jeuxvideo, etc.), this would be tantamount to refusing to support Western users (which may not be a bad thing, see question #1).
   
   So it’s not so much a selling point as a current point of rendezvous with users from certain locations.