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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

archive.org outright removes large numbers of pages, including political content; archive.is has edited a handful of pages to redact the doxxing of the archive.is owners.

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True. archive.org complies with removal requests from site owners [1]. The problem is that the content most worth preserving is exactly the content people try hardest to get taken down. If archive.is goes down, and between the FBI subpoena and the Wikipedia ban the pressure is real, archive.org becomes the de facto monopoly in web archival. A monopoly that honors takedown requests is not a reliable record of history.

[1]: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...

also, archive.org only verifies the current owner of the domain for takedowns. So if a site was hosting content, that content was archived the site then shut down and someone else acquired the domain, the new owner could request the removal of the old content.

The editing they do in self preservation is understandable, and far less wrong than having to kowtow to political pressure and private influence; archive.org is great, but unreliable in ways that archive.is et al are not. They're both very useful, in complementary ways.

I even think what archive.is did to their detractor was understandable - in poor taste, definitely black hat, don't do stuff like that, immature as hell, but hey, I get the human impulse that led to the bad decision, and I'm not gonna base whether I use the site or not on that.

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