[longislandguido]

Breach of trust by a site whose unstated primary purpose is bypassing paywalls and ripping off content?

20 years ago during the P2P heyday this was assumed to come with the territory. Play with fire and you could get burned.

If you walk into a seedy brothel in the developing world, your first thought should be "I might get drugged and robbed here" and not what you're going to type in the Yelp review later about their lack of ethics.

[bawolff]

Well if we are going to use this analogy, 20 years ago virus scanners also flagged malicious stuff from p2p as a virus, and people still thought putting malicious content on p2p was a shitty thing for someone to do (even if it was somewhat expected).

Nobody was shedding any tears 20 years ago for the virus makers who had their viruses flagged by virus scanners.

[kay_o]

Given they are retroactively tampering with past archives it's not exactly trustworhy in the first place

[vachina]

Proof?

[Hamuko]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

[flexagoon]

That doesn't say anything about them tapering with archive content

[frenchtoast8]

Yes it does. The last section of the article.

https://megalodon.jp/2026-0219-1634-10/https://archive.ph:44...

This is an archive of an Archive.is archive of a blog post. The first sentence of the post says “ Jani Patokallio was a woman of exceptional intellect…” This was changed, it originally had someone else’s name (see second paragraph). So, who knows what other archived pages were changed?

[celdon25]

I always thought that mainstream media sites with paywalls were pretty far down there in the tier list of websites though. Not sure if this analogy lands unless irony was the goal.

[jojomodding]

I trust websites not to involve me in crime. I trust news websites to tell me the news. I trust archive websites to give me old versions of websites. I trust paywall circumvention websites to circumvent paywalls.

What I do not see is the irony you insinuate in your post. It is not immoral to charge people for content, nor does that make you less credible. (It might even make you more credible since you now earn money by having happy customers instead of serving more ads.)

Some news sources are not trustworthy but that's independent of there being a paywall.