Neither. It bypasses paywalls and opens the discussion up to everyone, which is the main reason why it's used on HN, or the discussion on each article would only be between the (relatively few) subscribers of that particular site and those who haven't used up the "3 free views for this month" quota.
Fire up search on the bottom on the page and tell me what percent of "archived" sites don't require JS at all (so don't have any "pay us or fu" overlays popping up). I can tell you right now that 0% of those tracking-infested archive.ph copies of original sites work without JS on Firefox on Linux and certain other configurations.
As in: without JS, you can't see the stolen content on archive.ph while you can see it w/o JS (in most cases) under original addresses.