The more important reason is that it's hard to do programmatically. For every link, you'd want to link to the most recent, active archive entry. As far as I know, this isn't easy to determine.
Have you ever had the experience of going to archive.org, plugging in a url, and seeing that the most recent one is actually dead, but then you can go back in time and find what you're after?
It's easy to say "Well, that's ok. Take me to the dead link, and I'll go back myself." Maybe. But with Dan's exacting standards, I somehow don't think that'll pass muster.
The ultimate reason this probably won't happen, though, is because people can do it themselves. It's not hard to copy the link and visit archive.org. Every other link (past, flag, hide, favorite) is there because it's hard to do.
EDIT: On the other hand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30384630 shows a way it could be done. I didn't know about the date wildcard feature.
https://web.archive.org/$link will always take you to the most recently archived version of the link.
By "dead" I mean different content than the one that was submitted to HN at the time. So you need a way of specifying the date.
There's a way to do that, though, which is interesting. My edit above points out a comment to get it.
I mean, Wikipedia did it and archive.org survived. That has to be a totally different ballpark with regards to backlinks and traffic than niche HN.
Maybe a few years ago.
But you’re probably right about the load.
Hrm, are you sure about that?
I think I'd generally prefer to see each article as it looked when it was posted to HN, at least by default.
(that would translate to: minimum archive.org timestamp that is greater than the HN post timestamp)
Edit: ah, I've read your reply where you mention this exact use case. All good.
It would be an interesting experiment. You could prototype it with a tampermonkey script and post it as a Show HN.
Out of about ten links I clicked, I think there was only one that still worked. All the rest I had to run through the IA, whose homepage takes 5 seconds to load enough for the search box to show up, then wait for it to load the captures, and finally wait for it to fetch one of the captures. A direct link would be very welcome.
The addition should be easy, no need to query the IA site or anything because IA will find the nearest date to the request automatically iirc. Something like one week after the submission would allow post-submission updates without being likely to show a 404 capture.
(By the way, the question I ended up picking for our applicant was: "what did you like or dislike about the culture in previous places you've worked at or interned?" It went over well and I got some insight into what they'd expect (or enjoy) when joining the team. The colleague I did the interview with later said it was a good question :).)