Comment by righthand
13 hours 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).
> 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?
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.
> disallowing archival is practically suicide
The Times alone pulls a multiple of the Internet Archive’s visitors [1][2].
[1] https://www.semrush.com/website/archive.org/overview/
[2] https://www.semrush.com/website/nytimes.com/overview/
1 reply →
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.
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%.