Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7
11 hours ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20260220191245if_/https://arstec...
archive.today is very popular on HN; the opaque, shortened URLs are promoted on HN every day
I can't use archive.today. I tried but gave up. Too many hassles. I might be in the minority but I know I'm not the only one. As it happens. I have not found any site that I cannot access without it
The most important issue with archive.today though is the person running it, their past and present behaviour. It speaks for itself
Whomever it is, they have lot of info about HN users' reading habits given that archive.today URLs are so heavily promoted by HN submitters, commenters and moderators
I use archive.today all the time. How do you access pages, like for instance on the economist, without it?
Years ago I used some other workaround that no longer works, maybe something like amp.economist.com. AMP with text-only browser was a useful workaround for many sites
Workarounds usually don't last forever. Websites change from time to time. This one will stop working at some point
There are some people who for various reasons cannot use archive.today
Which utility, extension, tool or language is that?
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With the paywall blocker so good it got banned! You can also get it on Android.
https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
A Russian domain git website hosting just a readme.md and a copy of the MIT license but no source code? Just the extension files?
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for instance on the economist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060487
If dang and tomhow enforce a policy against paywalled content would garner less interest in accessing those pages via third parties. Most news gets reported by multiple outlets in general, so the same discussions would still surface.
you can change the tld of any archive.today link if .today doesn't work. for example archive.ph, archive.is, archive.md, etc
There's a DNS issue between Archive Today and some ISPs which causes their domains not to resolve properly, which is why some people have a lot of trouble using it.
Its not "a DNS issue" they are banned in many countries and there are ongoing court cases, so various enforcement mechanisms are used.
"archive.today" as used here means the collection of archive.tld domains, where .tld could be ".is", ".md", ".ph", etc.
"promoted" as used here means placing an archive.tld URL at the top of an HN thread so that many HN readers will follow it, or placing these URLs elsewhere in threads
The fact is i cant have a discussion about a paywalled article without reading it. Archive.today is popular as a paywall bypass because nobody wants HN to devolve into debate based on a headline where nobody has rtfa.
> Whomever it is, they have lot of info about HN users' reading habits given that archive.today URLs are so heavily promoted by HN submitters, commenters and moderators
It's not promoted, it's just used as a paywall bypass so everyone can read the linked article.