Internet to get even worse after Online Archives lose access to Reddit

The Wayback Machine, owned by the Internet Archive, will no longer save Reddit subpages. The website is going to block access for the bot because third-party companies were using the archive to train artificial intelligence. The argument of Reddit's administration has already been called into question, considering the page's previous actions. For internet users, this is like a barrier against the disappearance of internet history (via The Verge).

Reddit will not allow archiving subreddits

So far on the Wayback Machine, we could find various information from Reddit. These could have been individual threads, comments, or even user profiles. This gave an insight into the distant history of one of the most active social media platforms. However, this will change, as announced by Reddit's press spokesman Tim Rathschmidt:

Changes are taking effect right now, and the Wayback Machine bot will ultimately have access only to the main Reddit page. This means that only information about the most popular posts of a given day and at a given time will be archived.

According to the website authorities, this is necessary to protect the platform users, and the change can be reversed if the website rules are followed. However, doubts arise as to whether Reddit is really concerned about the well-being of its users. They mentioned that AI companies are training their models using data from the website. The page authorities didn't have a problem sharing this information if someone paid for it (like Google and OpenAI).

Preserving Internet is needed

Internet Archive is a non-profit organization, so unlike Google, it won't be able to pay 60 million dollars a year to allow a bot to record individual threads or subreddits again. The problem might seem small, but a lot of people miss the old times, and the Wayback Machine lets you take a peek into the past.

Using the Wayback Machine is a window to the "old Internet," when forums were at the peak of popularity, and spam comments from bots were rare (and bans appeared quickly).

Especially since the Internet is disappearing (and games might too). As the Pew Research Center studies showed, 38% of the websites we had access to in 2013 no longer exist. Researchers noticed that around 54% of Wikipedia articles have links that should refer to specific sources, but the pages they link to have been removed. Meanwhile, almost 23% of regular websites have broken hyperlinks.

There is always a chance that the Wayback Machine bot has saved a particular website, thus preserving the source of a given piece of information. As a non-profit organization, Internet Archive can't save everything, but what they do archive is widely available to everyone.

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• Internet Archive