MemoryHole launched on Hacker News this week, positioning itself as a personal internet archive tool built by someone who's been tinkering with web preservation for nearly a decade. The project offers two capture methods: a Chrome extension that makes exact copies of web pages, and an RSS feed reader that's still in beta but likely to stay there forever according to the developer. "I've probably been doing this in 2036 as well," they wrote, signaling long-term commitment to a problem that isn't going away. The timing is deliberate. The developer traces how the early web was trivially easy to archive—save HTML to disk, open it later, done. No stylesheets, no JavaScript, just tables for layout "just as God intended." Then Web 2.0 arrived and complicated everything: interactive pages required scripts, public content got locked behind login walls, and captchas became a regular obstacle even for paying subscribers trying to read articles on devices they already own. The frustration isn't theoretical—it's daily friction that most users just accept rather than fight. What's clearly grinding the developer's gears is the AI scraper situation. They're direct about it: "LLM scrapers are gorging themselves on the open web." Their list of grievances includes Cloudflare demanding AI labs pay per crawl, Reddit becoming profitable by selling user-generated content to AI companies, and xAI raising billions after training on Twitter comments. Meanwhile, responsible organizations like the Internet Archive face increasing barriers to access. The developer frames this as humans getting squeezed out of their own digital spaces while providing "exit liquidity" for AI bets through retirement portfolios—RRSPs, 401(k)s, public pensions all tied up in the infrastructure building these systems. The MemoryHole approach is deliberately low-tech and human-focused. Their Chrome extension captures exact page copies locally, giving users that déjà vu feeling of flipping through an old book with your own marginalia—except it's forum threads, blog posts, and comment sections from years ago. The RSS reader handles ongoing subscriptions. They're not trying to compete with Archive.org or build some grand centralized solution; instead, they're betting the web gets more locked down over time and offering a tool for individuals who want to preserve specific corners of it for personal reference. There's an unexpected human touch in the announcement: anyone laid off with "AI automation" as the excuse can email free@memoryhole.app for a complimentary subscription. It's not going to fix broken corporate incentives, but it's something—a small gesture acknowledging that workers often pay the price for leadership decisions dressed up as technological inevitability.

Key Takeaways

  • MemoryHole provides local-first archiving via Chrome extension and RSS reader (beta)
  • Developer has 10 years of web archiving experience and expects to still be at this in 2036
  • AI companies face criticism for aggressive crawling while ignoring robots.txt norms
  • Free subscriptions offered to workers displaced by "AI automation" framing

The Bottom Line

MemoryHole won't save the open internet or stop the AI scrape-fest, but it gives individuals a fighting chance to keep their own digital records intact before every website becomes pay-per-view. If you've ever lost access to something that mattered to you, this is the kind of tool you'll wish you'd had running years ago.