Not In Our Back Yard: Publishers Block Wayback Machine
www.mediapost.com
They are afraid the Wayback Machine is serving as a back door for AI content scrapers.
  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
    23·
    12 hours ago

    I noticed a few days ago when looking into americans leaving loaded firearms in ovens that we are losing archived news. I would find an article or story that is just missing now, all it is is a headline link to no where. And I have seen this trend on all things, we are losing the knowledge and for no other reason then the possibility of an extra dollar at some point. Take this and mix in the overwhelming amount of LLM generated bullshit pretending to be information tailored to peoples perceived interests (if you live in a religious area for example you see more religious bullshit) and we have almost inescapable silos.

    I don’t think I need to explain how dangerous this is.

    • AlexLost@lemmy.world
      17·
      9 hours ago

      Remember to support your local library. Only physically written words are going to be safe in the coming age.

      • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
        6·
        8 hours ago

        As someone that has been on my local library board… I got bad news for you on that one. Libraries are culling books like never before, facing licensing issues like never before, and funding issues like never before.

  • Saryn@lemmy.world
    70·
    19 hours ago

    Content scraping is harming the information business in ways that could not have been foreseen.

    What an absolute ridiculous thing to say.

    • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
      132·
      13 hours ago

      To be fair, the archive indeed got heavily abused into simply reading without paywalls. I know this is a controversial opinion, but seeing comments on other threads like “Remember to support news media”, then “use archive to bypass paywalls” then anger towards said companies for caring about getting paid or growing, makes one question where exactly does Lemmy draw the line between pirating and paid content. Or are we simply altogether against sites like 404Media just because of paywalls?

      • Saryn@lemmy.world
        12·
        11 hours ago

        That’s not the point. The point is content scraping (and crawling) is the cornerstone of the contemporary information environment. It’s how we got to this technological paradigm in the first place.

        This whole “people are bypassing paywalls” is a badly evidenced non-issue, and all too convenient. What these companies are really saying is “Content scraping is bad when others do it. Only I and other big fish get to do it and profit billions out of it. Fuck ordinary citizens. Fuck everyone and everything but me and my dreams of endless wealth and power.”

        To be fair.

        • gagcar@lemmus.orgEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          You say bypassing paywalls is a non-issue, but it is basically the only thing I have heard people say to use it for on social media. You can have your problems about data harvesting, but don’t pretend like getting around paywalls was not what the average individual user was using it for.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      171·
      18 hours ago

      “This isn’t letting us shape reality, that’s our entire business model, we are working tirelessly to shape people’s reality so this is definitely a no-go.”

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      4·
      13 hours ago

      FYI, any data on Lemmy can be used for the same for free. The federation infra can even be used to give AI models more direct access than even reddit is likely giving them. Just in case anyone is assuming that because this is community-run that it means the data isn’t being sold. It’s not, but it is being accessed by the same entities, if they want it.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          2·
          12 hours ago

          Oh yeah, not saying they are generally equivalent, just in that one particular aspect: access to comment data for any purpose.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
            3·
            12 hours ago

            Yep.

            TBH I think it’s kind of silly for the Fediverse to try and block scraping, as long as that scraping isn’t effectively a DDoS. It’s public.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      18 hours ago

      about 1 out of every 5 posts is an advertisement in disguise, and about 15% or more of users are actually bots.

      All of this is expected as a consequence of partnership with AI companies and google, and the site is basically walking dead, just a shell of corporate interests, manufactured conversations, algorithmically fed bait posts and so on… but it is a tad creepy how many of the AI bots keep making posts in “explain the joke” subreddits. We are so fucked.

      • tackleberry@thelemmy.club
        4·
        16 hours ago

        great catch! you can actually see the AI slop when it pops up. REddit is dead, and you should delete your data from that cesspool

        • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          15 hours ago

          I got 12 years of some of the top submissions and comments of all time before they banned then repeatedly shadowbanned me for no reason*, I will leave my data there because I want our granddroids to learn the very best from us.

          * It was speaking out against genocide and using stern language talking to MAGA chuds I think

  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
    14·
    23 hours ago

    Is the Guardian actually blocking the Internet Archive? Seems to work for me

    https://web.archive.org/web/20260224104430/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/23/trump-iran-airstrikes-nuclear-deal

    Meanwhile,

    https://web.archive.org/web/20260224121247/https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/413017/ai-basic-training-newsrooms-offer-little-practica.html?initial_article=412911&es_index_start=3&es_index=0

    e; huh, Mediapost article did in fact start loading on the Archive a few minutes after I posted this

  • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
    441·
    1 day ago

    I’m certain they’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and AI is a convenient way to justify it, rather than admitting they don’t want humans using it to circumvent the paywall. It does solidify for me personally that the LA Times is the paper of record for the United States going forward, rather than the New York Times.

    • hector@lemmy.today
      6·
      17 hours ago

      I just got a gift subscription to the NYTimes, for the first time since I quit in 2018, and it’s really gone downhill. I am learning about more big scoops from the guardian from lemmy posts than I see in their paper. I think Israel’s final solution for gaza here broke their brain, they had an identity crisis and sided with Israel and fascism over all the fourth estate democracy mumbo jumbo.

      They haven’t broken a single big story that I recall in the past year. Not a single one, even the wall street journal published epstein’s birthday letter from the president. The NYTimes gave up, they are no longer the paper of record, whatever problems before they covered events more thoroughly and had courage to break big stories, and now they don’t.

      • teslekova@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 hour ago

        That’s actually pretty sad. Also a serious problem for the USA. NYT, for all its faults, really was the best one.

    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
      14·
      23 hours ago

      The LA Times also blocks the Internet Archive unfortunately. I’d recommend PBS NPR ProPublica or some other nonprofit organization for your US paper of record.

      • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
        6·
        19 hours ago

        Ugh. Thanks for the heads’ up — I’ve definitely posted archive links without noticing they’re blocked before. PBS and NPR have really gone downhill with the budget cuts. ProPublica is great, but their coverage is pretty narrow, so there’s a lot of stories they don’t cover at all. It’s getting harder and harder to find a quality source.

        • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          15 hours ago

          Unfortunately, I think most quality sources with broad coverage aren’t free. Even the paid sources almost always have a corporate bias. Of those the financial times probably does the least to editorialize. Beyond that I think you just have to find independent journalists or outlets with a narrower investigative focus that you can trust.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      15 hours ago

      All of these companies only benefit from AI being employed to manufacture consent, alter reality and shape people’s social trends and habits. This is why they don’t want their data archived, they want to be able to use mobs of AI agents disguised as people to shape narrative and decide what people think is true.

      It’s already in massive progress across Reddit because it’s so easy to disperse undercover AI instances and create conversations to influence people.

      Even if you think yourself to be a critical thinker and reasonable, if you go into a huge, popular post and everyone in there is saying how the sky is green, and you ask what they’re talking about because you know the sky is blue, and then dozens of people pile on you, downvote you, call you names and insult you for believing in false facts and calling you naive and easily programmed, you’re really going to question reality and you may even go outside to take a second look at the sky.

      Of course, they wouldn’t do anything this bold, they will instead make far more subtle forms of “common knowledge” sentiments, able to change the minds of people who are otherwise smart and logical, but like every person, everywhere, just wants to fit in. So if those people see constant messages like “Of course it’s not a genocide, that was obviously manufactured propaganda, I have a brother over there and he’s saying…” etc, etc. That will absolutely change public perception of events and issues. To a cataclysmic degree.

      It’s already happening and it’s even happening here. Everyone needs to get a lot more skeptical and a lot less online.

      • teslekova@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Ideally, we would have our own personally run AI instances that can give us a probability that what we are reading is LLM generated. It’s still pretty good at recognising itself. That will be an arms race, though.

    • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
      17·
      1 day ago

      Well, Reddit’s got a contract for AI companies to scrape their content, so pig boy Spez is getting paid, he don’t give a fuck