
The Web Is Getting Old - rcarmo
https://brunoamaral.eu/post/the-web-is-getting-old/
======
orev
Having been on the web since the beginning, I really wonder how much of this
data really needs to be saved. Humans have survived until now without the need
to keep a permanent journal of every little detail of every persons life. We
do have historical luminaries whose works we save, but the harsh fact is that
most people just aren’t special enough where we need to keep everything they
generate.

We are now seeing that having old stuff resurface is largely detrimental. Back
when it was just some photos in a shoebox, or a paper journal, the worst that
could happen to your silly teenage ramblings was some embarrassment that you
could quickly move on from. Now you face potentially losing your whole career
and family because of some stupid thing you said one time when you were in a
bad mood.

One of the most important functions of the brain is forgetting. If you were
forced to remember everything, especially all the dumb stuff you did, your
mind would be perpetually cluttered and you could never progress and grow. You
only remember the significant stuff, and let everything else go.

The slow degradation of old sites is the Internet’s form of cleanup and
forgetting, and it’s a natural part of the lifecycle.

~~~
TravHatesMe
From the perspective of a historian or archaeologist, it is a shame that
things are forgotten. If the data that is being saved is not tied to your
personal name then I would prefer that it is archived forever. Not only for
the purposes of analysis when you are long dead and forgotten, but even within
our lifetime.

Sometimes when I am in a nostalgic mood, I will revisit forums that I once
frequented almost 20 years ago (surprisingly, the owner has kept it alive all
these years). I love looking at those old posts, reflecting back on how things
were at that point in my life. Reflecting back on the community members and my
long lost virtual friends, wondering where they are now. They could be dead
for all I know. I am glad that it has been archived.

In contrast, I have a side project that I work on occasionally. It is a plugin
for a legacy game. The hacking community of this game has long since moved on.
All of the golden knowledge of the game, the technical details, have vanished.
All the forum posts, all the contributions, are forever gone. The hours upon
hours of reverse-engineering efforts are down the drain. Not to mention all
the social interactions within the community; the drama, the humour, the
conversations. That is sad. I sure wish it was archived.

~~~
warent
I'm not sure how you can bear looking back at things you said 20 years ago,
let alone enjoy it. My past self makes me shutter and cringe

~~~
rhizome
Maybe you interpreting your past self is not the greatest value it provides.

P.S. "shudder"

~~~
warent
Oh god another thing to cringe about in the future! Make it stop!

------
dvaun
We are lucky that we have the Internet Archive to capture and serve content
for the public and give us access to some of these old sites that have gone
dark. I wish that I had done these things with some of the private forums that
I belonged to as a kid. Many important articles and conversations are gone now
that I didn't care to think to save them at those times.

It is nice to see that old monikers of mine aren't indexed and easy to find,
and yet it's also sad because I realize that much of that content I perceive
as reflections of my younger self and thoughts which I know I cannot imagine
again today. When I recall those memories I only recall my perception of
events: words that were said; actions taken by others; the consequences of my
actions. Yet, I can't repeat those exact thoughts because my identity has
changed since then.

I identify with the Zillenial[0] term. I also grew up on Linux and Windows due
to my dad's interests. That is one of the acts that I am so grateful of my dad
for, because it led me to where I am today.

For me, the web has been an important pillar of my life as it's given me so
many sources of information that have granted me knowledge, given
opportunities to read deep thoughts and niche content, and improved my
principles and views on life. I'm sure many people on HN can relate to that
statement, young and old alike.

[0]:
[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zillenial](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zillenial)

~~~
dcow
I know exactly the sentiment. I think part of it was that growing up I truly
believed the content I put on the internet would stick around. I didn't
understand why things needed to be archived for posterity—the sites that were
seemed to deserve such a fate anyway. I remember having so many interesting
and free thinking discussions with members of various forums (computer repair,
graphics editing tutorials, shurtugal to name a few genres). I honestly
thought facebook would be the same, but with more familiar faces to names. Oh
how I was wrong. Alas, Facebook was _new_ web.

~~~
dvaun
> I think part of it was that growing up I truly believed the content I put on
> the internet would stick around. I didn't understand why things needed to be
> archived for posterity—the sites that were seemed to deserve such a fate
> anyway.

Maybe this is where a lot of us fall short. Free and easily available content
is easy to take for granted since there is an abundance of it, like the
discussions here on HN. So we ignore capturing it with an underlying
assumption that it will be available again in the future.

Perhaps it's like the Bystander effect[0]?

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

------
minikites
>And a social network doesn’t have to vanish for you to lose access to what’s
there. The owner of a piece of content may lock their profile for any number
of reasons and you or your readers won’t be able to see it ever again.

I agree with the overall point of this article and on balance, I think it's a
net loss for the web and our shared web culture when content disappears like
this. However, I do think there is something to be said for a web that
"forgets" my angsty Livejournal posts, my poorly written and frankly obscene
fanfiction, and other things of that nature.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> However, I do think there is something to be said for a web that "forgets"
> my angsty Livejournal posts, my poorly written and frankly obscene
> fanfiction, and other things of that nature.

Yup, we can close the accounts, but someone, somewhere, has a copy of my
Livejournal Magnum Opus "Why didn't our shared love of Chemical Romance keep
us together?" and it keeps me up at night.

------
anderspitman
We need to make it easier for people to control a domain name, and host
content with HTTPS. You should be able to migrate your backend from provider
to provider or open source project without losing control over the URLs. All
individual content should be behind a personal domain name.

Here's a product I would love to pay for: A service that sells domain names,
but also makes it easy to use them. It should provide a tool like ngrok that I
can run on my local machine like this:

    
    
      not-ngrok host anderspitman.net 8080
    

That contacts the service, has you log in, then (on first run) uses Let's
Encrypt to get a cert for anderspitman.net, and sets up a WireGuard tunnel so
any server I run on localhost:8080 is now accessible via
[https://anderspitman.net](https://anderspitman.net).

This lets me host whatever I want from any machine I want, even my phone,
without ever having to mess with or think about certs again.

~~~
masswerk
There used to be a service exactly for this, but pre-HTTPS. It was free using
their TLD and a named subdomain, but you could also use your own domain name,
which was probably a charged service. Sadly, I can't remember the name.

~~~
anderspitman
Part of my motivation in commenting was hoping it already exists. There's not
much to it. The key is that it has to be very vertically integrated. I need to
be able to buy (or port), manage, and use the domain all from the same simple
interface.

CloudFlare does a lot of this, but you need a public server for them to proxy.
They seem well positioned to add a CLI tool for the last mile ngrok-like part
though.

~~~
dvaun
> CloudFlare does a lot of this, but you need a public server for them to
> proxy. They seem well positioned to add a CLI tool for the last mile ngrok-
> like part though.

It's funny that you mention this, because they actually do have a service for
hosting static sites in conjunction with a CLI tool, wrangler, for publishing
them: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/extending-the-workers-
platform/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/extending-the-workers-platform/)

~~~
anderspitman
That's obviously a related idea, but I have concerns:

* Complex. What if I don't need a CDN or kv store?

* Why just static sites? Why not just forward to a local port then you can run whatever you want, including a static server. One huge advantage of being able to run on your local machine is you have access to terabytes of storage at very low cost. You can host as much images, videos, music, etc as you want, especially if it's behind a simple login (like a NextCloud server).

* Not open source.

------
jermier
The URL structure of my blog has changed so much over the years and I have
subjected my subscribers to so many 404s that it made me put everything in a
self-hosted pastebin for peace of mind. All I have to do is keep that pastebin
alive and the domain renewed and my content will be preserved well into the
future.

I've still yet to find a registrar that promises to keep a domain renewed past
the 10-year limit though. The closest service I found is Mark Monitor but that
seems to cater for large companies / corporations who need to protect their
intellectual property (and it's expensive!). Can't have someone registering
apple.com when it expires!

~~~
pmlnr
I have this:
[http://petermolnar.net/404.json](http://petermolnar.net/404.json) It's the
data source for a fallback PHP that tries to do magic if the static resource
wasn't found.

How to: check your server logs, look for 404s. See if you can set up a
redirect, or serve a HTTP 410 Gone.

I agree on the domain problem. It's a big problem.

------
caiobegotti
I was wondering about an old WordPress just this week, related to the post
content. In the past I managed to migrate a very simple WP to static pages
with Pelican but I have a pretty complicated WP still running and it is a
museum of lots of trips I did many years ago and I decided to keep it up due
to the some rare info there (it's a RTW travel kind of site). I wish there was
an easy way to keep the style, theme etc so I could get rid of WP for good and
still let the site get old but still be there with its essence without
damaging the visuals. I can't help but imagine the despair of people who would
instead use a commercial product to create or host something like that, given
even WP is hard enough when things get old.

...as for the site migrated to static pages, some posts are 15 years old, most
of them are 10 and the most recent one is 5 so because the web is getting old
I had to add a big disclaimer with a red background in every post stating
things change, people change, the content and its form may change too so
"please be gentle when interpreting it, the web is getting old" :-)

Right to be forgotten should be the default but I wish we also had the opt-in
right to be remembered.

------
pmlnr
Dear author, if you're reading this: please don't write such a superficial
entry. It doesn't actually bring any resolution to the "I get things are bad,
but what are we doing to fix it?" /Tomorrowland/ problem, and it could.

Link to static generators that can import WordPress. Link to `wget --mirror`
tutorials to archive. Link to
[https://www.archiveteam.org/](https://www.archiveteam.org/) so people could
participate. Mention the Web Archive, point to IPFS, and to DAT.

SHOW SOLUTIONS. Lamenting won't fix it.

Personal story: yes, dynamic sites suck. My 2002 archives are static HTML; no
problem getting them. 2004 is a PHP4 CMS, I needed a Debian Sarge to run it.
2007 is FUBAR character encoding mismatch between server, HTML, any DB, plus
PHP < 5.3 with MySQL > 5.6. 2010 and up is WordPress, but if you don't save it
all - MySQL same version, WordPress same version, all plugins the same
version, etc - it's hard work to get it back.

~~~
brunoamaral
If you mean the article’s author, that will be me

The site is only marginally aimed at developers, it is mostly for people in
communication or marketing fields. Some of the ones I know are not even aware
of the problem of content decay (lets call it that for now).

It is also about the mistakes the web community made while building the sites
we use daily. Not assigning any blame, the web will always be uncharted
territory.

Most of all, I wanted to write down that we saw good things being built. There
are a lot of good reasons to keep moving forward.

Regarding tools, and as side note, that blog is running on
[https://goHugo.io](https://goHugo.io) , a static site generator, and uses the
self hosted version of [https://commento.io](https://commento.io) to manage
comments. It’s my way of trying to make it future-proof.

