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I donate monthly to archive.org. I'm sure I've got more than my money's worth out of reserved websites that had something valuable to me.
Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
11–20 of 105 posts
Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#12> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.
https://www.google.com/search?q=jack+ma&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min...
First result for me is https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-m... which Google thinks is from 2003-03-15, except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't.
Second result is https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ which Google thinks is from 2001-01-02, except Instagram didn't exist at that time. It might have pictures from 2001 though.
Third result is http://pacificpower.foreignpolicy.com/15-jack-ma/ which Google thinks is from 1999-02-15, except it mentions Alibaba's 2014 IPO so it obviously isn't.
Fourth result is https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=5041357966634... which Google doesn't show a date for, but it's a Facebook post from 2018.
...
I don't doubt that some of those results are from 1998 to 2005, but the millions of results number specifically is meaningless.
Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#13Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#14Par for the course.
China as we (the world) knows it is only about 60 years old. This is more true as they go about systematically destroying their own history and forcing village traditions to be stamped out and guided towards the city life.
Losing a blip of internet history during the regime of mass censorship is probably a blessing in disguise.
Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#15> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.
https://www.google.com/search?q=jack+ma&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min... First result for me is https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-m... which Google thinks is from 2003-03-15, except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't. Second result is https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ which Google thinks is from 2001-01-02, except Instagram didn't exist at that time. It might have pictures from 20…
Yep; there may be a lack of incentive to preserve old sites, but what's worse are the ranking algorithms that prevent their discoverability in the first place.
Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#16Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#17[flagged]
Exactly, and without the likes of the Internet Archive, even the open web isn't safe. I think like most history preservation efforts today, you have to be really intentional about it given the sheer amount of information and noise. This isn't like centuries ago when everything public was a few periodicals and newspapers and books, accessible through very known channels.
Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#18> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.
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Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#19Par for the course. China as we (the world) knows it is only about 60 years old. This is more true as they go about systematically destroying their own history and forcing village traditions to be stamped out and guided towards the city life. Losing a blip of internet history during the regime of mass censorship is probably a blessing in disguise.
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Re: Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
#20Written by He Jiayan (何加盐), an internet influencer active since 2018, the essay concluded, based on a wide range of searches of various entertainment and cultural figures from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, that nearly 100 percent of content from major internet portals and private websites from the first decade of China’s internet has now been obliterated.
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