Welcome to the future of the internet. Good luck trying to find a 2 days old news article on facebook from a big publisher, because you wanted to read the comments.
Information has a half life. And for digital information it’s really short. I always thought the digitization of documents and media is a bad idea for this very reason. Photo albums are not as common anymore, more people read through screens. All the information is getting stored in devices that expire, get thrown away, or that won’t be able to be accessed in a couple decades.
Think about all of the information that we have stored right now digitally. If nothing is actively done to keep it safe, how much of it do you think will survive in 100 years? Instagram, Facebook, and Google will not be around forever. Your personal photo galleries videos and files WILL be lost unless someone deliberately curates them for preservation.
I was just listening to a YouTube playlist of mine that goes back at least 10 years and was disappointed how much of it was deleted. And not only that, but in many cases I couldn’t even tell what the videos were.
Literally just today, I picked one music video that just seemed to be gone from youtube and the internet, but thankfully was able to find a Wayback machine link to the artists website in 2008 with a .mov download link.
I was going through my YouTube subscriptions on an account that’s been active since 2010ish. I didn’t recognize several accounts at all. They had deleted all their older videos and changed their account names.
I found myself subscribed to things that I would never have subscribed to. Either I had done it accidentally or they changed their name and took their videos in a different direction.
It’s a bummer because there are some old videos that were pretty funny/creative and now they are just gone.
It could also be that they no longer used their channel but were hacked. I’ve seen a handful of larger youtubers have their channels get hacked, rebranded to something completely different, then explain what happened when they get it back. With smaller inactive channels, its unlikely that they’ll be changed back.
Going through top posts on some subreddits is pretty grim nowadays because of the Gfycat collapse. Turns out Gfycat was a huge chunk of all the links on the internet.
I have said multiple times before that 2013 was the worst year ever. I’m still proud of that opinion, but maybe, just MAYBE, there was something good about that year after all, so it wasn’t all darkness and rainstorms.
The online era is going to be a thousand Library of Alexandria’s worth of lost information, records, journals, news, … everything. It will all just digital-rot into the memory hole.
Also… I once created hellblade.com. We sold gaming computers with cases that changed colour with heat in the UK. Was a total disaster. Now it’s some big game franchise. Wish I’d kept the domain.
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
It would be interesting to know how many of these references don’t exist anymore and how many have just moved. Web has come a very long way since 2013 and I bet that websites hosting the references have undergone several iterations altering the URLs in some way.
That, in and of itself, is also a problem! First of all, because such pages often fail to return a HTTP 301 moved permanently response, and second (but perhaps even more importantly) the reason they move is because the site transitioned from using static, human-readable URLs to some kind of unstable CMS-managed non-descriptive gibberish that breaks caching and linking. It’s an intentional siloing and hoarding of content.
Everything you post has potential to remain forever even if it’s not monetized directly. Cautioning people about it makes sense now and has always made sense.
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