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Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web

theatlantic.com

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

#181

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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.

Good news, you can block ads embedded in youtube videos: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

It skips sponsors (even from the youtuber itself), jingles, intro, etc.

It's awesome.

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

#182

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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.

And libel laws do not stop it being n1 result on google, or random people re-posting it. Libel laws were meant to deal woth traditional media

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

#183

Post by MaxBarraclough »

unethical_ban wrote: post #165
ergot_vacation wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read the whole thing, it seems partially good, martially misguided, and partially terrible. The overall bent is a hand-wringing about link rot, which I thought we mostly got over a decade ago. The Internet is fundamentally ephemeral. If you see something you like, save it so you can repost it later. If you rely on someone else to keep in up indefinitely, you're being foolish. Around the edges of that main disc…

>The overall bent is a hand-wringing about link rot, which I thought we mostly got over a decade ago. The Internet is fundamentally ephemeral. If you see something you like, save it so you can repost it later. If you rely on someone else to keep in up indefinitely, you're being foolish. Did we? Should we? Acknowledging the current state of affairs doesn't require accepting its flawed nature. Imagine a world where gas…

Isn't the BBC typically pretty good at maintaining old URLs? An example: a BBC article on the 9/11 attacks, published on that day: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm

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

#184

Post by southerntofu »

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, too, was fascinated by a "web without browsers" (or with other kinds of browsers, really) until i stepped into the community and realized that community was a proto-nazi cesspit full of misogynistic attitudes.

Maybe now that times have passed, people have died who posthumously admitted their preferences for white supremacy (and heavily bitcoin-supported that), and whole projects have been renamed, there can be a more inclusive community built around browserless web? For those who haven't followed, i'm refering to Woob (previously Weboob). I'd be interested in other people's feedback about that community lately, the ideas are great!

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

#185

Post by TeMPOraL »

azinman2 wrote: post #162
a1369209993 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap Fuck no. Do not do this . Use youtube-dl[0], and maintain local copies of anything useful you can find. 0: http://youtube-dl.org/

I’m happy to give YouTube my money to provide a real alternative to ad-supported models. Plus the vast majority of videos I watch id never want to see again.

You're not really providing YouTube an alternative to ad-supported model - you're only proving that lots of obnoxious ads can convert people into paying customers.

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

#186

Post by jhunter1016 »

abeppu wrote: post #141

I feel like it's been quite a while since I saw anyone talking about IPFS, but I used to hear about it not infrequently. I don't know if this is because it was too nerdy, or too misaligned with the incentives of most organizations (it's scary for some to not be able to unpublish), or because it comes with some privacy sacrifices, or perhaps it just matters less when hardly any page is actually static any longer. But,…

Yep. I find it odd that the article doesn’t even mention IPFS. Brewster Khale is a big proponent of IPFS, so that would have been a perfect opportunity to bring it up.

IPFS has its flaws, but content addressing and immutability are powerful.

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

#188

Post by meepmorp »

southerntofu wrote: post #184
PaulHoule wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, too, was fascinated by a "web without browsers" (or with other kinds of browsers, really) until i stepped into the community and realized that community was a proto-nazi cesspit full of misogynistic attitudes. Maybe now that times have passed, people have died who posthumously admitted their preferences for white supremacy (and heavily bitcoin-supported that), and whole projects have been renamed, there can be a m…

> I, too, was fascinated by a "web without browsers" (or with other kinds of browsers, really) until i stepped into the community and realized that community was a proto-nazi cesspit full of misogynistic attitudes.

Could you expand on that? It seems a bit out of (anti-)left field, so to speak.

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

#189

Post by ajsnigrutin »

kylestlb wrote: post #30

It'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…

> audit when content is changed via takedown requests

Not just that, but even due to politics, someone wanting their history "changed", or even worse reasons.

There were multiple reddit arguments recently, when someone posts a newsstory about something, discussion starts, two hours later the story is changed (without any footnote or old version available), and arguments start, because "there is noting in the article that says ", and no way for the original poster to prove, that it was, because noone even thought they'd need a screenshot.

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

#190

Post by ajsnigrutin »

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.

What I hate about youtube the most is their deleting of videos AND metadata... I make a "watch later" playlist, with stuff that i must watch, two weeks go by, and there is a "[Deleted video]" in my playlist... not even a title left behind (so i'll be able to find it elsewhere).
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