[nonameiguess]

Practically speaking, somewhere near zero people were going to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, but now won't because an archive link gets auto-added to a link aggregator and they don't need to go to archive.ph themselves and search for the URL, or wait two minutes for the top-voted comment to be an archive link added by a human.

[CubsFan1060]

I guess I fail to see how this makes it better?

"I'm not going to pay for it, so I should get it for free". I don't particularly see how any of that makes it more ethical.

[not1ofU]

It you're gonna get all ethical, surly you have also heard, how hard it is to get out of those subscriptions?

How about when an article gets changed (or removed), without archiving sites, how would you know?

At the end of the day, if its "actually" valuable to someone (e.g their livelyhood depends on it or something), they will probably pay for it.

[CubsFan1060]

Yup! I'm very careful about my subscriptions. But if I don't agree with the business model, I just don't consume the product. I don't see it as my place to arbitrarily dictate how others should be paid for the fruits of their labor.

Maybe better put. Someone else being unethical doesn’t absolve me of ethics, imho.

[not1ofU]

"Someone else being unethical doesn’t absolve me of ethics" - Fair point!