Would anyone expect that they were anyway?
Even if you consider
- sites getting bought up and rehosted elsewhere
- sites changing names
- personal throw-away WordPress sites
- sites for educational purposes made by the students themselves
- sites going bankrupt
- news site, social media channels closing down
Can’t see why this isn’t very natural, and I’m actually surprised it’s not higher if you consider how fast that field is moving.
Hosting sites costs money.
Sometimes, people run out of money.
Sometimes, money runs out of people (ie people die).
My personal site was always just for me and my friends, but when it became too costly of an endeavor to keep hosting, I let it go.
A small business that goes completely out of business doesn’t need their website to exist 10 years later, now do they?
This isn’t just personal sites. Large blogs (Gawker), whole news sites (Vice), and other content no longer exist, because cynical corporate parasites bought them out. Newspapers that exist from before the internet era are arguably better archived on microfilm, Google Books etc, than today’s news. The Internet Archive and other sites exist, but they are nonprofit and can’t keep up with the sheer scale of content being pulled down. Also strongly disagree with your assertion that some sites don’t need to be saved. The whole point of archiving is that we often can’t judge what is important to future generations
I understand all that, but I can almost positively assure you that my shitposting isn’t super important to have saved, other than for personal reasons. I have a backup of my site from the time, I’ve held onto it, for sure. But after I die, I’d really rather it stop existing, just like I do.
And we really don’t need to remember every business that started and failed within two years. I certainly don’t see a great reason to document my dad’s shitty used car salesman antics of my youth with his own business. It’s honestly also best forgotten by time. There’s more worthwhile and prolific con-men to write about and keep documentation thereof.
And frankly, if I don’t want my past to be on the internet forever, that should be my choice. Just like in the past, pre-internet-and-computers, if I didn’t want to share my writings with anyone before I died, I could burn them properly to make sure they were lost to time.
My original intent was literally meant as a Devil’s Advocate counter-point to the point of the article. Sure, we can’t tell from where we sit what’s important to the future… so maybe trying to save everything is a fools errand to begin with, since we don’t know what’s worthwhile to save? Saving literally everything for the sake of the future seems ill-considered. Once again, I assure you my shitposting with my friends really isn’t all that important culturally or socially.
I’ve felt much the same way for decades. I am very grateful that all the stupid shit I thought, did, or said as a young person wasn’t preserved by some omnipresent archival machine. Some moments are best lost to the winds of time. People who grew up with the internet and social media don’t know what life was like before. I’m not a “good old days” kind of guy, but I do think the archive-everything-forever compulsion does vast amounts of harm.
You probably responded before I made my edit, but do you remember how 14 years ago there was actually a lot of worry about how things on the internet would be around forever and how that would change society?
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html
EXPIRATION DATES
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.
Because it’s interesting that now the other side of the coin seems to be the primary concern. Previously we were considering expiration dates on data and deep user control. Now the attitude seems to be the opposite, that it shouldn’t be up to the user, but up to the archivist.
Thanks for sharing this, it’s a fascinating take. I am certainly not against archiving things that are worth archiving. And I am not qualified to know who should or should not have the authority to make such a determination when it comes to “historical things”. But I do believe that individual people (who are not public figures in positions of power / accountability) should always have the option to be forgotten if they choose to be. I am average person of no particular historical interest or merit, I don’t really need an expert to tell me that. If I want my shit deleted at any time, and especially after I die, that should be my right. However, “ownership” can get very murky when we sign EULAs and are talking about the costs of hosting, etc. So there are “overriding factors” that may occur, too. Those should never be deceptive or misleading. But of course, they often are. They hide a lot of evil assertions in boring legalese. Google lets you delete your digital data with them if they detect no activity within a time-frame you set. If they are not full of BS and actually honor this, I think that’s pretty cool. The compulsion to archive everything is really just data hoarding. Not that different from people who live in a home surrounded by clutter they never use.
The real issue is that we seem to be purging all the wrong things.
Useful answer to technical question? Gone five years later.
Unfounded and fraudulent accusation that some teenager in Albuquerque committed a hideous crime? Preserved for the ages. Revenge porn photos? Also preserved, although possibly without the attributions.
Although, really, all of that is human nature too: we conserve what draws the attention of the average mook, not what specialists find useful.
Interesting it’s only cost me about 40 dollars a month to host a bunch of sites right now. I think I can consolidate them down to one server and be about 10-15 bucks a months. I am not hosting any pictures right now thoug, which can add up
I would be MORE surprised if they where still there.
For over 15 years, I oversaw the technical aspect of the biggest weblog in my country. I took great professional pride in making sure that every time we migrated to a new cms, links would keep on working, even when the external pages they linked to were since long dead.
A couple of years ago I left. Last year they changed cms once more. Now all the links are dead, and can best be found through through archive. The content was ported to the new cms, but the links weren’t. So even though the content is in the database, it’s just inaccessible by its old url.
Such a shame.
You were doing the God’s work
Yeah, that’s the internet for you. Anything you want to stay around will vanish someday, and anything you want gone will be here forever.
We ultimately don’t know what is going to survive the digital revolution. I wonder what’s going to be lost to time and what historians and archeologists will be able to recover and view centuries or millennia in the future.
It’s a good thing I save a doc version of things/articles I find interesting online.
Shout-out to Archive.org for all the awesome work they do to backup what they can from the internet.
(Especially when some stack overflow answer to a question is just a link to some website that has either changed or no longer exists).
best website to use allongside wayback machine to see how websites looked back in the good ol days.
I learned this a while ago: If you find something interesting save it localy.
Saved this comment to notepad in My Documents, thank you 🙏
2013: everything is flattened to oblivion (thanks, Apple)
2023: a quarter of the internet literally dies
Things are supposed to get better, not worse.
Things are getting better for like, 20 people.
One day we’ll know more about the Roman Empire than the early Web
