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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

I pay subscriptions to some of these sites and still use archive.is on them because it is a more pleasant reading experience. No auth failures, no annoying popover windows begging me to subscribe to their dumb newsletter. Just the internet equivalent of a static piece of newsprint.

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my personal theory is that archive.is has paid subscription accounts (legit or via botnet) to most of the major news outlets and edits the html to make the sites look not logged in. I wonder if they do it by hand or by doing something like : https://github.com/pirate/html-private-set-intersection

in my experience it's just a headless browser with a bypass-paywalls extension

It is definitely more than that for some sites and it has to be manually managed. For example this year i've seen archive.is capture paid articles of some finnish newspapers and the layout gives away that it is logged in on an account although the identifying details have been stripped out.

There have been periods of weeks/months when they don't have paid access to those Finnish sites. Tried it just now on a hs.fi paid article from today and it didn't work, but for example paid articles from just a week ago seem to have been captured as a premium user.

It is curious how they have time to do it and I wonder if news sites of other smaller languages get similar treatment.

Create vpn on a GCP ip address, use googlebot user agent, paywalls gone

Probably works against a fair few sites, but not if they are using RDNS.

More than a theory -- they've talked about this on their blog[1] before.

[1] https://blog.archive.today/

I used to do the same with Lynx but enough websites have now broken it.

ublock with annoyance filters also solves this

Is there any more annoying popup than the newsletter popup? I'd rather see a targeted ad than that BS.

NO! I do not want your newsletter! I wouldn't even have an email address if it wasn't absolutely required to operate in society today. The less email I get, the better!

Email is becoming like fax machines: An old, dated technology that refuses to die.

Physical feels that way to me sometimes. In the US, I get assaulted on a constant basis by mailers and ads for things I never expressed any interest in. Waste of time, waste of paper, waste of resources.

Personally I don't mind an offer to subscribe to the newsletter but Substack is way to aggressive. They show the prompt even before I have finished the article (How do I know if I want to subscribe?) and obscure the article (actively working against what they know what I am trying to do). So I now just immediately back out when I see that. I won't visit sites that are purposely harming the experience.

Sites used to open up popup windows, then browsers got better at blocking them. But instead of taking the hint that people didn’t want that, they just moved the popups inside the page content. The prevalence of ad / tracking blockers is entirely due to the user-hostile actions of site owners.

> Is there any more annoying popup than the newsletter popup?

Rhetorical I'm sure, but actually yes! The popup that tries to get you to switch to the app when you are actively trying to give the offender money! eBay is a notable offender here (it pops up when I search for stuff to buy; why would you interrupt that?)

Sigh. You're correct.

I'd give you an award but you've hit your maximum number of free things this month. Make an account, pay for a subscription, and sign up for needless spam then we'll let you have it along with some ads for good measure.

The purpose of creating a site is to earn money, and newsletter popup is a step in a sale funnel. Text is just a bait.

Same, I also use links from HN threads and I donated to archive.is in the past. I don't want them gone.

Sharing articles I like to people I know is the other reason, when the site doesn't have any functionality for that.

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