38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.
remember kids, everything you post on the internet stays forever*
*unless it cannot be monetized anymore
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.
I know a lot of people still have terrible fanfiction they wrote as teens on the internet somewhere, so the warning is very appropriate.
The WayBack Machine would like a word: https://web.archive.org/
Even the Wayback Machine has limits to what is available.
Oh, that stuff is out there somewhere... in a database
Or on a server hanging out in a landfill.
Really? Because I don't think my dick pic can be monetized
Sure it can. People will pay to not see it.
Maybe start a charity and raise money that way?
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 permanentlyresponse, 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.And how many are the site completely re-jigging their CMS with no forwarding set up.
Permanently Deleted
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.
And when trying to find a backup, no search engines can find it due to the AI garbage fucking up the SEO
Well put
I wonder how this compares the the number of businesses that existed in 2013 that no longer exist. I wonder for two reasons:
- Is 38% similar to the typical rate of failure for businesses and other ventures?
- How much of the 38% can be explained by closure of high-risk businesses like restaurants?
Something else that could explain a lot of it is webpages that were always intended to be ephemeral. Political campaign websites for instance.
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.
disgusting. it's like early TV where people thought it was low-rent crap and not worth saving.
it always seems impractical to store this stuff but then it goes away and you realize how much you're missing.
Perhaps something like IPFS would help mitigate this. Popular stuff would be pinned by someone.
well a friend made a site called lookingupthebuttofadeadbear.com and it isn't accessible anymore but i don't think anyone misses it
Makes me wonder how many dead links and webpages there must be
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.
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.
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.
It had MOAR websites to access.
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.