[alberto-m]

> Any alternative is better than the current state of things.

I don't know, the incentives for creators are already low enough. Any book one writes lands immediately in Anna's Archive and is digested into LLM slop for the profit of Altman & Co. Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments. So we are already in a Bastiat's window situation where people are disincentivized to produce creative work. I'd rather not put the work of software creators even more at risk of being cheaply copied and copyright laundered: any state vault would be an easy target for trillion-dollar corporations.

Aside, as someone doing retro reverse engineering I greatly appreciate the author's words about the tension between software preservation and the need to reward creators for their work.

[nottorp]

> Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments.

That is generally because they're on random sites that want you to subscribe for a year to read the one piece that was mentioned on the sites you read... not going to happen, sorry.

[nottorp]

How this worked for printed news back in the dark ages was:

A friend told you about an article, or a headline piqued your interest.

You could anonymously hand a negligible payment (few cents or dollars in cash) to an intermediary (the newspaper seller at the street corner) to get access to all the content published for a certain time period (daily/weekly/monthly issue of the publication).

Now a "friend" (for example a HN post) still tells you about an article. Unfortunately you can't get an issue, they want an ongoing commitment. It's not anonymous, you have to create an account. The intermediaries are gone though, is that a good thing?