HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewstuart

Why are paywalled articles on HN mostly available on an archive link?


Why are paywalled articles on HN mostly available on an archive link?


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
(1) Technically, I think that site works by identifying itself as the Google webcrawler and seeing the full-text version that many sites would like to have indexed.

(2) There's the question of why that site isn't taken down (or how it pays its bills) and my guess is this:

In the 2000s it was an open secret that you could read the news on most sites like The New York Times with the username and password "media/media" Paradoxically, journalists need paywall bypass to do their work, and it is completely unrealistic that the The New York Times is going to buy a subscription to each and every small town paper. Or that the small town papers are going to subscribe to the other small town papers.

For that matter, how is a high school comp teacher going to check the citations of what students write when they are grading from home?

How are we going to hold publications accountable for articles that they can pull down or revise?

That site addresses many serious needs that the world has and there seems to be some agreement that it just isn't talked about. Contrast its marketing to

https://12ft.io/

which makes big claims but has most popular news sites disabled on request.