Wouldn’t it be better to let these legacy news orgs (which aren’t really anything beyond advertising and data harvesting firms) block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under? I’m struggling to think of a reason I need NY Times. I’ve never had a subscription and never seen writing that I thought benefited me as a citizen (they’re Very pro-war of any kind).
> block archive.org and thus no one will read their articles and they can go under?
…why would they go under if the people who don’t pay for news stop reading them?
Media influence and authority has historically depended on getting cited by writing that is more directly relevant to the reader's concern (i.e. the topic of research).
The paywalls were one thing, but disallowing archival is practically suicide.
> disallowing archival is practically suicide
The Times alone pulls a multiple of the Internet Archive’s visitors [1][2].
[1] https://www.semrush.com/website/archive.org/overview/
[2] https://www.semrush.com/website/nytimes.com/overview/
Yes and citations are a matter of quality, not quantity.
The whole point of archiving is so that people can review it later. People living in the future are the vast majority of readership (and no they didn't pay for it).
The article's place in historical context is far more important than the paper itself. Writing that stands the test of time and that gets cited frequently is where all the authority and credibility comes from. It's absurd that the NYT of all places can be this boneheaded, but I guess it's a sign of the times.
if people are reading the articles through wayback, then they aren't making any money because no data is harvested and no click-thrus or impressions or whatever the metric is are registered.
People are willing to post links to paywalled articles when there are ways for people not currently inclined to subscribe to read them. Even if 97% of the current non-subscribers bypass the paywall, having 3% become subscribers is very useful, especially if they become recurring subscribers.
If posting the link instead implies that the 97% of people not currently willing to subscribe can't read it, then people instead post a link to a publication their audience can read, in which case the first publication gets actually 0%.