[kulahan]

Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.

[didibus]

archive.is is a charity no? Or at least they take donations, it seems the legal entity behind it is nebulous, but they don't have ads and have no paid product or offering.

[hoistbypetard]

They sure as shit do have ads. Have you ever accidentally followed a link using a browser profile that has no ad blocking enabled?

I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.

Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.

I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.

[didibus]

I stand corrected, maybe it's because I have ad-blocks that I never noticed.

And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive.

It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.