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Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

hawaiigentech.com

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Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#111

Post by Ensorceled »

shortformblog wrote: post #102

This man’s entire argument is completely terrible for two reasons: 1) The example he uses is The Epoch Times, a questionable source even on the best of days. 2) What he refers to as “spam” is a paywall. He is literally taking away from business opportunities for this outlet that produced a piece of content he wants to draw attention to, but he does not want to otherwise support. He’s a taker. And while the Wayback Ma…

> 2) What he refers to as “spam” is a paywall. He is literally taking away from business opportunities for this outlet that produced a piece of content he wants to draw attention to, but he does not want to otherwise support.

For the destination site, this is all of the downsides of AMP with none of the upsides.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#113

Post by mountainb »

ImaCake wrote: post #96
mountainb wrote: post #92

Link rot has convinced me that the web is not good for its ostensible purpose. I used to roll my eyes reading how academic researchers and librarians would discourage using webpages as resources. Many years later, it's obvious that the web is pretty bad for anything that isn't ephemeral.

>I used to roll my eyes reading how academic researchers and librarians would discourage using webpages as resources. While this is true in general, I am amused that this is not true for citing wikipedia. Wikipedia can be trusted to remain online for many more years to come. And it has a built-in wayback machine in the form of Revision History.

Try following the references on big Wiki pages and you will see why Wikipedia pages are nightmarish for any kind of research. This is important when you are trying to drill down to the sources of various claims. Many major pages relating to significant events and concepts are riddled with rotted links.

The page can be completely correct and accurate, but if you cannot trace the references then it cannot be verified and you cannot make the claims in a new work as a result. The whole point of references is to make it so that the claims can be independently verified. Even when there isn't a link rot problem you will often find junk references that cannot be verified.

Wikipedia isn't a bad starting point and sometimes you can find good references. But it is not anywhere close to reliable: just trace the references in the next 20 Wiki articles you read and your faith will be shaken.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#114

Post by Taek »

alfonsodev wrote: post #81
deepstack wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah at some point, way back machine need to be on webttorrent, ipfs type of thing where it is immutable.

it's there any active project perusing this idea ?

https://github.com/exp0nge/wayback

Here's an extension to archive pages on Skynet, which is similar to IPFS but uses financial compensation to ensure availability and reliability.

I don't know if the author intends to continue developing this idea or if it was a one-off for a hackathon.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#115

Post by nullandvoid »

I experienced this just the other day.

I was browsing an old HN post from 2018, with lots of what seemed like useful links to their blog

Upon visiting it the site had been rebranded and the blog entries had disappeared

Waybackmachine saved me in this cass, but a link to it originally would have saved me a few clicks

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#116

Post by sfg »

mountainb wrote: post #92

Link rot has convinced me that the web is not good for its ostensible purpose. I used to roll my eyes reading how academic researchers and librarians would discourage using webpages as resources. Many years later, it's obvious that the web is pretty bad for anything that isn't ephemeral.

We have deposit libraries in the U.K., such as The British library and Oxford University's Bodleian. When you publish a book in the U.K. you are supposed to offer a copy to these institutions.

If we had legal deposit web archiving institutions, then academics, and others, could create an archive snapshot of some resource and then reference the URI to that (either with or without the original URI), so as to ensure permanence.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#117

Post by boogies »

mcv wrote: post #26
bartread wrote: post #21

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…

Would be nice if there's an automatic way to have a link revert to the Wayback Machine once the original link stops working. I can't think of an easy way to do that, though.

I just use a bookmarklet

    javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href.replace(/\/$/,%20'')));
(which is only slightly less convenient than what others have already pointed out — the FF extension and Brave built-in feature).

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#118

Post by polygot »

bartread wrote: post #21

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…

I made a browser extension which replaces links in articles and stackoverflow answers with archive.org links on the date of their publication (and date of answers for stackoverflow questions): https://github.com/alexyorke/archiveorg_link_restorer

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#119

Post by FinnLeSueur »

bartread wrote: post #21

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…

> generate a report of broken links

I actually made a little script that does just this. It’s pretty dinky but works a charm on a couple of sites I run.

https://github.com/finnito/link-checker

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#120

Post by prgmatic »

I stopped reading after the part where they describe the paywall gated version of the journalism website as “Now it’s spam from a site suffering financial need.”

That website spends money creating content for commercial viability, it doesn’t have to bow to you and make sure you can consume it for free, and the Wayback Machine isn’t a tool for you to bypass premium content.

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