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[return to "Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?"]
1. intern+AV[view] [source] 2026-01-15 05:11:01
>>rabino+(OP)
There's really no interpretation of this which isn't malicious, although, not to defend this behaviour whatsoever, I'm not entirely surprised by it. The only real value of archive.is is its paywall bypassing abilities and, presumably, large swaths of residential proxies that allow it to archive sites that archive.org can't. Only somebody with some degree of lawlessness would operate such a project.
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2. Brybry+MX[view] [source] 2026-01-15 05:32:06
>>intern+AV
It's not just for paywall bypassing. Sometimes there are archive.today snapshots that aren't in the Wayback Machine (though I think your overall point about lawlessness still stands).

For example, there was some NASA debris that hit a guy's house in Florida and it was in the news. [1] Some news sites linked to a Twitter post he made with the images but he later deleted the post. [2]

The Wayback Machine has a ton of snapshots of the Twitter post but none of them render for me. [3]

But archive.today's snapshot works great. [4]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9www02e49zo

[2] https://xcancel.com/Alejandro0tero/status/176872903149342722...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240715000000*/https://twitter....

[4] https://archive.md/obuWr

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3. intern+h91[view] [source] 2026-01-15 07:15:29
>>Brybry+MX
Archive.today has a different approach to the baseline archive technology (executing javascript at archival time and saving the DOM instead of saving and replaying server responses verbatim). Additionally, Archive.today employs a number of site specific mitigations which aren't visible to the end user. In some cases, for instance, they use accounts, but then retroactively modify the DOM to mask this mitigation. [0] While the exact strategy they use for Twitter isn't known to me, they are doing something by their own admission. [1]

[0] https://blog.archive.today/post/708008224368001024/why-isnt-... compounded with personal observation.

[1] https://blog.archive.today/post/708565142782246912/pretty-pl...

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