
The Internet Isn’t Forever - kawera
https://longreads.com/2018/02/20/the-internet-isnt-forever/
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John_KZ
Also a lot of surviving websites are no longer so accessible. ie Youtube and
reddit comments, panoramio pictures (which google kept but you can't see, even
if you took them), even capturing a large amount of tweets is pretty hard
right now.

Companies are closing down all data they can grab. Youtube used to have a list
of the top 1000 videos ordered by view count and other parameters. It allowed
you to explore and filter their data. To choose what to see. To index their
content. This is no longer possible. They want to keep everything they know
about you private, and they want to control what you see and "discover".

This is pretty far away from the open web we had 10 years ago. Part of the
blame is Javascript, but most of the blame is on users who don't care.
Smartphones ruined the internet in my opinion. Sure, there's more content than
ever, but it's not freely available. In fact you're not even allowed to know
what's available.

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baud147258
I've tried to read this week an (unfinished) fantasy novel on a forum, which
has been there for a few years. I had already read a few chapters and it was
very well-written. Except the author decided last month to remove all his
content from the place (10000+ forum posts), which included this unfinished
novel and two others. I tried to find back-ups (on the internet archive), but
only the first page of each thread was saved. I only found a few chapters
using google cache. And I don't think the mods will agree to restore the
content. So yeah, I can relate with the idea that internet isn't forever.

~~~
baud147258
And in addition to the disappearance in the same site of many image-based
let's play with the changes with imageshack and photobucket.

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StellarTabi
I got burned by this yesterday. I was looking for an old photo that was only
on myspace, but apparently they had a huge content purge and it was long past
the migration phase :(

~~~
agumonkey
This era is so weird.

On one hand internet promised information highway, pure digital storage.

Instead it's social network noise highway and same bitrot.

~~~
gumby
The tech may have changed but the people have not.

Thus they put the same amount of effort into the same things (ephemera vs
permanence).

~~~
agumonkey
True, it's just amplified to a rare scale.

It just examplifies how marketing is pervasive no matter the field.

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WheelsAtLarge
Very true, the internet has a memory problem. If you try to research something
that happened, let's say 10 years ago, by using just the Internet you'll have
lots of trouble. If it wasn't printed in one of the major newspapers you're
out of luck. Not only that but you'll need to go through a truck load of data
if you want to expand on what the newspapers have to say. I suspect that
eventually, no one will be able to look back at the net's past since
cryptography is becoming a must for everything net. If you're reading this and
you encrypt your data, think about the data 10 years ago that you encrypted.
Can you get to it? Maybe. Think about someone else's. I bet you can't. What
happened 10 years is blurry now. If that's the case now then what will happen
100 years from now.

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ggm
SRI-NIC wiped all the WHOIS NIC handles when they handed the job on to
somebody else. Network Solutions I think. So, my 1985 NIC handle got wiped by
the dotcom boom sometime between 1992 and 1998.

Stuff been dyin' on the internet since forever.

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awgneo
I am so glad the article mentions IPFS and the great potential it has to solve
this very issue.

~~~
titzer
Diffusion of responsibility is no responsibility at all.

We need to have a well-funded, well-run, serious effort at preserving digital
history.

~~~
majewsky
[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

~~~
vog
Archive.org is a great project that one can't recommend highly enough.

It's not "just" collecting huge amounts of data, it is a _living_ archive. For
example, when they publish old Amiga software, they publish it ready to use.
And I don't just mean polished disk image files. I mean ready to use right in
the browser. Click on a ancient game, and play it immediately in your browser!

That's exactly the kind of attitude towards archiving that we need. Like one
of the more modern museums where you are allowed to touch (and interact with!)
things.

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amelius
Computing and storage capabilities can grow (practically) without limits.

Human information consumption, however, has limits.

Therefore, I don't see the problem.

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agumonkey
I wonder if archive.org analyses the data to see what's "useless" or not

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muthdra
Yeah, duh.

I don't think the internet was ever supposed to be forever. Sometimes it looks
like it's forever because people copy content from one public place to the
other but this behavior is not inevitable.

