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Comment by lzy | Hacker News Reader

So I try to make a copy of any interesting web pages on archive.is these days.

http://archive.is/faq#Why_does_archive_is_not_obey_robots_tx...

This one is funny, because conservatives have used archive.is for some time to archive and mock left-leaning websites and some of them blocked archive.is in the past and still block archive.is today.

VOX for example returns a 0-sized page for archive.is. In the past VICE returned 404s to archive.is https://i.imgur.com/OnFdVpS.jpg

What I mean to say is that these services are useful but they are not faultless.

Why are so many irrelevant political left-vs-right "he said, she said" type comments popping up on HN just lately?

I personally think this is simply a result of how much harder the media is pushing that divide (for all of their various purposes). I actually spent some time last year researching this, because I thought I might have just become an old man thinking how great things used to be. I started reading old news stories fairly randomly, from the present time all the way back to the Vietnam era (and a few rabbit holes to earlier times). The first thing that surprised me was the amount of link rot that exists. I always knew intellectually that it was a problem, but wow. It's bad. The second thing that I found was that indeed, the media hammers on the "us-versus-them" political divide of American politics much, much harder nowadays than even ten years ago. I think Fox News was really the turning point. It opened the flood gates. I always remember thinking how "extreme" Fox News was, but I challenge anyone to look up a few of their older stories from the middle of the last decade. It's child's play compared to what pretty much every media outlet is doing today. You can hardly read a recent news story from just about anywhere without being told how it's supposed to fit into our political worldview, and how we should feel about it, and why it's good/bad/stupid/amazing/"terrifying". And so of course, because of this, people are just responding to the programming. Creating the world they're led to believe we they live in. I think it really is that straightforward.

Do you have a selection of those old stories - would be interesting .

Ah, I apologize, I didn't keep notes or save links or anything of the sort, and I keep kicking myself for it. I'm usually pretty good about taking notes just out of my regular habit of doing research, but it was so casual, and I didn't think it would end up taking as much of my time as it did. It's a pretty easy formula to replicate, though. I picked current events that I could remember -- intervention in Kosovo, Bill Clinton's sex scandal, Berlin Wall, first election of Putin, Enron scandal, those kinds of things -- and just started looking up stories, and asked my parents and older friends to help me with events I wasn't old enough to remember before the 80s. I made sure to hit a "good" cross-section of the media outlets of the day.

Thanks - it seems like a half day project to build a spider for this ... one for the list :-)

I'd love to see the Bush/Gore 2000 election play out on social media. I was only a kid but the news coverage seemed pretty mild compared to how I imagine it would be if that happened in 2016.

Did you just look at print? Talk radio has been hammering this since the late eighties. Hell you can probably draw a line straight from the "Moral Majority" shit in the seventies, to where we find ourselves now. I suspect this has always been a big part of American culture, but it's being magnified now either by new tech or malicious actors or both.

Oh, you know, that's interesting. I hadn't even thought about talk radio, but you're absolutely right.

Mentioning that certain publications block archiving is not irrelevant.

Everything is partisan political now. What books you read, what films and TV series you watch, where you live, the definition of "political" itself, and to some extent even what internet archiving service you use. (In reality, left-leaning folks have used archive.is to save and mock conservative sites for some time too, but even though this happens across the board it's still normal and expected to think of this as a partisan political activity because everything is now.)

The people that used to hang around /r/incel are now spending their time elsewhere on the net.

https://twitter.com/ArshyMann/status/988818797086871558

How you maintain cognitive dissonance in defending such personal blog sites masquerading as news outlets despite admitting that a word-for-word reproduction of their words constitutes mockery is beyond me.

VICE didn't just block archive.is, they blocked the Internet Archive too by returning the exact same 404 page. They really didn't want any archived copies of their posts hanging around anywhere outside their control.

I think having written short sighted things and then regretting them is a somewhat universal thing. I also don't have a problem with either side using previous writings, as long as they are reproduced accurately and faithfully.

In short, before you publish a blog post that is sexist/racist/homophobic/whatever, consider that even if you delete it, others may have a copy and will use it against you.

well in this case it is a left leaning activist who taking this other left leaning activist down. it is not always the politics we expect but we can guarantee if its political it will be nasty.

the issue I have is, we should not be able to just block access to archived content because its embarrassing.

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