Comment by palmotea
4 hours ago
> When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.
That doesn't seem nefarious, though. It makes sense they wouldn't want to reveal whatever accounts they use to bypass blocks, and the logged-in account isn't really meaningful content to an archive consumer.
Now, if they were changing the content of a reddit post or comment, that would be an entirely different matter.
Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".
> Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".
No, certain edits are understandable and required. Even the archive.org edits its pages (e.g. sticks banners on them and does a bunch of stuff to make them work like you'd expect).
Even paper archives edit documents (e.g. writing sequence numbers on them, so the ordering doesn't get lost).
Disclosing exactly what account was used to download a particular page is arguably irrelevant information, and may even compromise the work of archiving pages (e.g. if it just opens the account to getting blocked).
The relevant part of the page to archive is the content of the page, not the user account that visited the page. Most sane people would consider two archives of the same page with different user accounts at the top, the same page.