Live data from Hacker News

The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

lil.law.harvard.edu

21–30 of 167 posts

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#21

I didn't realize you bought the pixels permanently. How did the owner keep up with serving costs?

He promised to keep it up for 5 years. After 5 years, the site had zero traffic, and there was no point of keeping it up. Also, links started going dry at that point with original owners no longer caring.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#22
post #7

I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?

Initial Coin Offerings are bizarre, fairly straightforward and can be fun.

> fairly straightforward

I've read a lot about ICOs and I still don't understand what's going on. I can't even tell what people are actually buying (like EOS, where it explicitly says the tokens are worthless and not convertible). An even bigger question is why people are throwing so much money on them when it's so unclear what you're getting.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#25
post #5

Decaying in more than one way. The JS files on milliondollarhomepage.com start with: /* FILE ARCHIVED ON 5:47:20 Aug 6, 2015 AND RETRIEVED FROM THE INTERNET ARCHIVE ON 20:45:17 Aug 24, 2015. JAVASCRIPT APPENDED BY WAYBACK MACHINE, COPYRIGHT INTERNET ARCHIVE. ALL OTHER CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT (17 U.S.C. SECTION 108(a)(3)). */ I guess someone didn't keep backups?

Or just a way to shore up dependencies

Start working at home with Google! It’s by-far the best job I've had. Last Wednesday I got a brand new BMW since getting a check for $6570 this - 4 weeks past. I began this 6-months ago and immediately was bringing home at least $98 per hour. Go to this website and go to tech tab to start your work.......

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#26
post #2

The Million Dollar Homepage is not decaying (it is still serving its million dollar purpose) - it is the Web itself that has decayed. The brittleness of URIs is on full display. "Cool URLs don't change," but most of these URLs were never cool: they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.

It's a frame of reference problem. Note that this article is published by a library research group. One of the hottest topics in library science is how to archive and reference the WWW. While it's entirely valid to view the Million Dollar Web Page as a decaying artifact (let's call this the Art Critic view), it is also possible to view it as an archaeological record that needs its links to be complete (let's call thi…

I'm making over $15k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. Read more on this web site...W­­W­­W.joinmate2.ℭ­­o­­m

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#28

FWIW, I'm building https://PageDash.com as a private web archive to address the problem of link rot, beginning from a personal level. Launching in late August. Think of it as a private version of perma.cc.

Very cool, I'm definitely interested in signing up when you launch this!

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#29

I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?

It's just a random example of something silly going viral. Stuff like this definately could work today (potato salad kickstarter was a thing) but any individuals attempt probably wouldn't work, it mostly comes down to luck.

Not a million bucks, but $71k for something very recent...that was even more upfront about how useless it was. https://uetoken.com
Post reply on HN