Visiting an old forum and all the pictures will be gone because, surprise, free image hosting doesn't make economic sense.
Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
41–50 of 220 posts
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Domains, if not outright sold by the owner, should die then.
And never be possible to register ever again? I feel like most easy-to-type domains would have been permanently expended in the early days of the web.
You wish there was some way you could make the links go away...
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#43Fungi serve an important role in nature.
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#44For those hitting the "monthly article limit" paywall, this can always be bypassed on The Atlantic by opening the link in a private window.
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#45Knowing that it decays is what prompts us to try and save the bits worth saving. I don't sit in the camp that everything digital must be preserved and that it's a disaster if it isn't. I try not to fight entropy in it's many manifestations. It's a shame when content disappears but I think it's also healthy to just accept it. We tend to only frame information disappearing in a negative light because we can always imag…
Ironically, deleting stuff on the web is technically REDUCING its entropy.
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#46It's an Atlantic article so it's long, and several of the comments here show that people aren't actually reading the whole thing... but I did and it's worth the time. It's not only about links being dead, it's about the lack of transparency & audit when content is changed via takedown requests, it's about dead links showing up in decades-old supreme court decisions, it's about private industry's lack of incentive for…
Maybe the reason it feels impossible to stem the tide of link rot is that it's takes tremendous energy to constantly increase the entropy of a system. And that energy has opportunity cost that no one really wants to talk about. The article has the unstated assumption that eternal preservation of all writing ever is a net benefit. I think it's worth having a discussion on that point.
> Maybe the reason it feels impossible to stem the tide of link rot is that it's takes tremendous energy to constantly increase the entropy of a system.
I suppose you meant "decrease"
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#47I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on YouTube. There are so many old live concerts, useful how-to videos and other cultural treasures amidst all the junk. I suspect that one day, they will make their ads unblockable by embedding them in the video files. I sure hope that some people are downloading the valuable stuff and stashing it away to load onto YouTube's successor.
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#48The article does not scroll on an older Chrome... the internet is indeed rotten.
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#49Visiting an old forum and all the pictures will be gone because, surprise, free image hosting doesn't make economic sense.
The web forum that I frequent most, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com , has a policy of not allowing embedded images but requiring them to be attached on each post. The forum has been active for well over a decade now (site was founded in 2004) and has a thriving community that continues to grow. It is the community that keeps the forum alive instead of just one random company (although it technically is a company). This helps prevent link rot. Forums seem anachronistic in 2021, but they have massive benefits versus the gigantic platforms like Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, and the quality of the discourse and analysis is far higher. There are a few ads, but they’re very unobtrusive.
(Also, Twitter posts are often linked, but usually the text is copied for archival purposes.)
My experience with Wikipedia, forums such as those, and Wayback Machine and arxiv.org make me think that people will do a lot of stuff basically for free and that by building communities, you don’t need extremely clever trustless incentive systems like Blockchain or major paywalls (although granted, the forum does have something like a paywall for unverified pre-public info) or massive platforms with multi billion dollar companies in order to disseminate information, analysis, news, etc. Best practices of web forums from the 2000s (active moderation, a sense of common purpose, expectations of non-toxicness, etc), are a really good solution.
Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
#50Buddhists chuckle at the notion of permanence and go back to constructing sand mandalas
I know your comment is probably tongue-in-cheek but I must say (without disagreeing, regardless) that perhaps modern day digital infrastructure can transcend the considerations early buddhists may have had for the natural world and then-contemporary human-built structures.