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Online Content Is Disappearing
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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How is this news? I bet a lot of pages were also added in the same time frame, very likely orders of magnitude more.
I’ve heard the early Internet age referred to as the future dark ages. When all the work, information and content is digitized, it’s prone to being lost to history forever.
Early Internet - yes, but then there's the middle Internet (or the high Internet if you like, like high Middle Ages) which was in large part scraped by archive.org, and also people generally still knew about offline backups in both eras, and then there's the late Internet, which moved to siloed services and at the same time most people using it were and are oblivious about preserving data elsewhere. That's the worst one.
My partner works in historical archiving for science and medicine. Museum work, basically. He's told me so much of the archives are donated collections of notes, letters, journals, and so on from important doctors, researchers, scientists, etc. Donated by the subject themselves in their later years or by their families.
He's told me there is a growing issue with those people starting to donate entirely digital collections, but even worse than that, are all the documents that are not being stored on a physical hard drive, but on web services and clouds. By the time these people are willing to start donating their things, so much of it has just been deleted forever without them realizing it. Or worse, they die, and their families no longer have access.
Working in IT, I told him about Microsoft's growing push to eliminate Outlook and PST files, make it all web based email, and he wasn't surprised, but he was still bummed to hear it. Apparently a not insignificant amount of those donations are locally stored emails.
Because those pages had information that wasn't on the new pages?
Just from my own experience, WotC migrated the Magic the Gathering site to a new one, and while some articles were brought over there were a whole lot of stories, strategies and event coverage that were lost or are only available thanks to Archive.org
I ran across software once that wouldn't compile properly and the only documentation available was an archive.org hosted backup of an Intel help page that no longer exists. There is no alternative, Intel just removed it entirely.
Yes. The whole post is a trick with statistics. Web pages have a limited lifespan. You can do the aame trick with human life spans.
"50 % of humans that lived 60 years ago are now dead". You would tweak the numbers to be factual but something like that makes sense to me.
If you only keep the samples you started out with, of course it's going to decline over time. The data is guaranteed to not grow since nothing is ever added.
No. What you'd make a page for in the 00s, you'd create a FB group or something in the 10s. Hostage to corps and probably too removed for whatever reason.
And not indexed due to crawling bot-decisions
Sure a lot of pages of ad infested ads replaced human produced content.
And those added pages were probably just as worthless as the ones they replaced.