Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 220 posts

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#101

Post by majormajor »

codingdave wrote: post #62
majormajor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would mean ignoring the huge volume of newer stuff? A hundred years? Two hundred? I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? In…

If you grew up before the internet, surely you remember all the DIY manuals that lived in everyone's home. Everyone had that same big hardbound book of how to do basic home repairs. Many people had sewing books, electrical books, Chilton manuals for their cars. Cookbooks, too. We have valued how-to information for decades, and that interest and need far pre-dates the internet. So while I get what you are saying that…

Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives to check out those old how-to books, they're using contemporary sources on Youtube instead.

And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in fifty years.

I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my generation. It might temporarily have a lot of monetary value near my death - when other copies have already been lost - but to someone born fifty years after me? What use would pulp fiction from the 80s be to many of them?

My parents and uncles are in a bit of disbelief of how little even I care about the Beatles already, after all.

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#102

Post by ulber »

krapp wrote: post #95
ct0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the cool stuff has gone back to IRL. Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space. I would recommend hackaday.com because it hasn't changed in quite some time.

>Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space. Entire new genres of creative output - music, fiction, fandom, films, cosplay, hobbyist and enthusiast communities have been spawned by the modern web. It's never been more vibrant. I'll never understand why people on Hacker News seem to believe the internet stopped evolving as an expressive space…

Yeah, the internet is bigger now - all of the weird fringe stuff from enthusiasts is still there and there's even more of it. One thing that has happened is that the mainstream is there too now, so if you don't venture outside that its easier to not see the more interesting stuff. In the old days, when just having a "homepage" placed you a bit outside the norm, stumbling on something non-mainstream was more of a given.

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#104

Post by [deleted] »

Robotbeat wrote: post #49
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #41

Visiting 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).…

[deleted]

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#105

Post by toiletfuneral »

throwawayboise wrote: post #88
pfraze wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not 100% convinced by your assertion that censorship only favors the rich and powerful. It can and often does, but it can also help people without power or society and large. For instance, taking down a dox for a niche YouTuber is clearly not helping a powerful person, but it's still arguably censorship. The misinformation area is somewhat stickier, but here's a decent example: if somebody decided to hurt you by…

> if somebody decided to hurt you by spreading rumors We have libel laws to address that. GPs point is that Google, Facebook, et. al. are premptively censoring non-mainstream content just to protect themselves. They don't really care about the public.

[dead]

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#106

Post by glasss »

PaulHoule wrote: post #29
uniqueuid wrote: post #16

By the way, the technical side of this is very interesting. If you look at the tools mentioned (the wayback machine, but also perma.cc and other archival solutions), almost all of them rely on a single semi-modern tech stack that produces WARCs (web archives - ISO - ISO 28500:2017 https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/wa... ). The main crawler still seems to be heritrix3 ( https://github.com/inter…

WARC can record and replay single-page apps, but it struggles with knowing where a "page" begins and ends. There was a time when I was furious with the web going to hell and I investigated the possibility of "web without browsers" that started with making a WARC capture of page and putting pages through extensive filtering and classification before the user sees anything. With interactive capturing you can push a but…

I'm completely out of the loop on something like this, but could you in theory apply some kind of ML to identify the end of pages to assist with good page captures?

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#107

Post by BatFastard »

throwawayboise wrote: post #88
pfraze wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not 100% convinced by your assertion that censorship only favors the rich and powerful. It can and often does, but it can also help people without power or society and large. For instance, taking down a dox for a niche YouTuber is clearly not helping a powerful person, but it's still arguably censorship. The misinformation area is somewhat stickier, but here's a decent example: if somebody decided to hurt you by…

> if somebody decided to hurt you by spreading rumors We have libel laws to address that. GPs point is that Google, Facebook, et. al. are premptively censoring non-mainstream content just to protect themselves. They don't really care about the public.

Have you ever had to deal with the court system? It is VERY slow, expensive as hell, and utterly frustrating.

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#108

Post by mdoms »

majormajor wrote: post #56
wintermutestwin wrote: post #47

I 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.

How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would mean ignoring the huge volume of newer stuff? A hundred years? Two hundred? I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? In…

You don't know what's important until much later. That's what makes archiving difficult.

Also, important to whom?

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#109

Post by deadalus »

tda wrote: post #69
makomk wrote: post #63

It's amazing how little some trusted institutions care about this. For example, the BBC has been bragging about how many people rely on their coverage of the pandemic, but have an obnoxious habit of repeatedly overwriting old articles with new ones on similar topics and not keeping the old versions available. The history of a once-in-a-century pandemic with huge local and global impacts is literally being overwritten…

On the bright side, using a tool like Internet archive it should be easy to filter out which articles were removed and/or edited by the BBC, in a way highlighting the most historically important articles.

Wayback Machine censors many websites(like 4chan) from being 'saved'. Wayback Machine also removes previously archived videos/websites in certain cases. They are not neutral.

Re: Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

#110

Post by BatFastard »

majormajor wrote: post #101
codingdave wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you grew up before the internet, surely you remember all the DIY manuals that lived in everyone's home. Everyone had that same big hardbound book of how to do basic home repairs. Many people had sewing books, electrical books, Chilton manuals for their cars. Cookbooks, too. We have valued how-to information for decades, and that interest and need far pre-dates the internet. So while I get what you are saying that…

Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives to check out those old how-to books, they're using contemporary sources on Youtube instead. And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in fifty years. I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my generation. It migh…

Well not caring for the Beatle is like not caring for Mozart. Bad taste is always an option in a free society.
Post reply on HN