Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> There are also indications that the operator(s) are based in Russia.

That's long been my assumption.

What I haven't known was whether this was good Russian people (culturally valuing literature and intellect) wanting to be able to access articles that they can't afford.

Nor whether it was or could become something sketchier (e.g., feeding spy databases, or one nice Chrome zero-day and strategic timing away from compromising engineering workstations at most US tech companies where an employee reads HN).

But what actually bothers me about the misc `archive.*` sites is how HN routinely uses them, for US tech company workers to circumvent paywalls for struggling journalism organizations. This piracy practice seems to have the unofficial blessing of the US tech investor firm that runs and moderates HN. Besides whatever laws this is breaking, subjectively, it feels to me like crossing an ethical line, and also (economically) like punching down.

I only very rarely read articles from these sites, and on these occasions I tend to get a lot of value out of it. I’d be happy to pay a dollar (or a couple bucks) per article. But I tend to forget about my subscriptions, and don’t read enough articles to justify it, so I’ll be wasting a lot of money buying it.

The problem with the paywalls is that everyone offers a subscription. If you want to read a single article you do not want to subscribe to some US newspaper.

x402 solves this.

X402 doesn’t solve this, because the publishers don’t want to sell you just a single article.

Just because they don't 'want' to, doesn't mean it's not a good solution. Clearly they're not getting me to pay for their whole site subscription so why not just sell me the article? The biggest issue with most of these services is the lack of consumer 'ease' by which the creator can actually get paid. It's the same reason why I'm seeing all my friends go back to piracy, it was nice when we had a consumer convenient place to consume our content. Just look at Steam, it's easier than ever to go pirate the majority of games, but my Steam library just keeps getting bigger. I'm not against buying things, I'm against shitty services.

I can't argue with your ethical concerns.

The internet is fundamentally different than print though—perhaps this fundamental change to journalism requires another way to pay the bills. (Advertising is the obvious one.)

Or maybe we, as a society (because of our internet ways) simply don't deserve these services any longer.

Perhaps the internet itself is the problem. What if instead that was the big mistake after all?

Called passion. Pays in spades. Something bots know not of. Includes carbon bots.

It seems there is not enough "passion" to pay the bills, sadly.

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