A tidy argument, complicated by the fact that the NYT justifies its existence at least as often in terms of public good as of selling a product.

> the NYT justifies its existence at least as often in terms of public good as of selling a product

It can be both. Public goods don’t have to be accessible to everyone to benefit society.

> justifies its existence at least as often in terms of public good as of selling a product.

I’d be troubled by that if they were also taking public money to do so (ie state subsidy), but they aren’t. So what they claim is kinda meh.

They shouldn't. But the Times is also notorious for changing things after-the-fact to better fit an editorial bias or to groom their own reputation. If they are indeed 'the newspaper of record' then unfortunately they need to be held to account for what I personally view as a violation of their duty to the fourth estate.

Internet Archive links are found in comments on HN all the time, not just for the New York Times, but for nearly any site using a paywall.

You are confusing the Internet Archive and archive.ph, which are very different things

? No, many people do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30154781

And archive.is which is the one I see here the most.

Ok now I understand so many of the replies in this thread.

For anyone else reading thei who doesn’t know: Internet Archive is archive.org aka the Wayback Machine. It takes like 10 seconds to load a page but has years old versions of pages.

I for one have done this and there are websites and extensions that do exactly that, take a url and return the archive url to bypass the paywall. As much as I love internet archive i don’t think it is debatable people use it for this purpose.