Site got hugged? Is there a torrent?
Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
11–20 of 231 posts
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#12Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.
Seriously. 2009 is several years after everyone was already saying “web 2.0”! That is nowhere near the “old web”.
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#13Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web. I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.
It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving. We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing. Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.
> We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing.
No, we hot-linked all those image hosts because we didn't want to pay to host it ourselves.
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#14Remember the good ol' days when we all thought that everything on the web would exist for eternity and over.
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#15100% AI generated text. The irony.
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving. We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing. Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.
> We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing. No, we hot-linked all those image hosts because we didn't want to pay to host it ourselves.
...and I had fun replacing images people directly linked from my server with less-- ahem-- savory images.
I enjoyed the emails I got from a couple people who were adamant I "hacked" their site because their "web developer" linked to images on my server... images that now said stuff like "I'm a loser bandwidth thief!", etc. (I never did use really nasty "shock" images-- just taunting stuff.)
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#17Purevolume mention made me sad. I miss that community.
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#18I found an old database backup of 0.mk on a disk I had kept. 0.mk started in 2009 as a passion project built by three of us. We worked on it for a few hours each week around our regular jobs. We eventually closed it in 2014 because the revenue (hint: no revenue) could not cover hosting, development, and the constant work of fighting spam and reviewing abuse. The recovered historical corpus contains 657,607 links. For…
How did you managed to obtain that domain? Usually single digit or letter domains are “reserved”.
ICANN might have set some rule for .com/.net/.org but it's not universal for all tlds
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#19Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.
The old web doesn't necessarily mean the oldest web. 12-17 years ago was very much an older fairly different era of the web that's worth analyzing even if it's on the younger side of the old web. I can definitively sympathize with your reaction though, it doesn't feel like that era was that long ago yet.
Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
#20Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web. I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.
It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving. We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing. Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.
Even Archive.org is rather limited in what it keeps. I know of a very large site that recently disappeared. archive only has part of the web html part of the site. Everything else is either gone or non accessible.