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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

#61

Post by ergot_vacation »

djoldman wrote: post #3

> People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. This is a particularly good quote to sum up the article. The internet is not a repository of facts, it is a repository of facts, spam, junk, and things . Moreover, it is not the only repository of these. Link rot happens. Content is subject to…

Exactly. The Atlantic author seems to be laboring under the misguided assumption that the web is somehow the same sort of thing as a library of books. Even libraries often have some degree of garbage information in them, and represent a survival story: the vast majority of books ever written are no longer in print, or even discoverable anywhere.

Good stuff should be preserved, but it's not the Internet's job to somehow magically do it. It's OUR job, and the nature of digital information (DRM not withstanding) makes this easier than ever.

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

#62

Post by codingdave »

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…

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 much of the pop culture videos do not hold long-term value (which is also questionable considering how many of us older folk still have collections of vinyl)... there absolutely is valuable content out there that deserves preservation.

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

#63

Post by makomk »

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 day by day.

Sometimes this helps them whitewash their screw-ups which have lead to widespread false beliefs. For example, after the UK government targetted and hit 100,000 Covid-19 tests in a day, the BBC ran an article falsely claiming Germany had achieved this a month earlier and linked it prominently on their news front page for about a month. A large proportion of the population probably saw this and now falsely believe it, it got brought up all the time as part of the narrative that the government's big "world-leading" achievements were just playing catch up badly, but it was memory-holed from the article in a rewrite and they used that as an excuse for not publishing any correction - so unless historians dig deep in third-party archives, they'd never understand where that belief came from. (Apparently a previous version of the article also wrongly claimed France was carrying out more Covid-19 tests due to mistaking their weekly numbers for daily one, according to a correction which disappeared from the article after a few days and only exists in the Internet Archive now. I haven't been able to find the original version of that claim.)

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

#64

Post by toomuchtodo »

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.

https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup

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

#65

Post by okareaman »

beaconstudios wrote: post #57
datameta wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your comment is probably tongue-in-cheek but I must say (without disagreeing, regardless) that perhaps modern day digital infrastructure can transcend the considerations early buddhists may have had for the natural world and then-contemporary human-built structures.

buddhists fundamentally reject clinging to the idea of permanence as a source of inevitable misery when your wishes go unfulfilled.

I think technology will be invented to keep track of everything and their associations even if the link becomes dangling. It's an obvious problem to work on.

You only lose what you cling to

Gautama Buddha

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

#66

Post by varispeed »

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.

I download everything I like. Storage is cheap now.

Plus smaller sites will start disappearing because of regulatory capture. It will not be possible to run a forum or similar site in few years.

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

#67

Post by beaconstudios »

okareaman wrote: post #65
beaconstudios wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

buddhists fundamentally reject clinging to the idea of permanence as a source of inevitable misery when your wishes go unfulfilled.

I think technology will be invented to keep track of everything and their associations even if the link becomes dangling. It's an obvious problem to work on. You only lose what you cling to Gautama Buddha

the problem is that doing so would require storing a copy of the entire subset of the internet that you choose to persist, which requires you to either choose a small subset, or pay huge storage fees!

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

#68

Post by datameta »

okareaman wrote: post #53
datameta wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your comment is probably tongue-in-cheek but I must say (without disagreeing, regardless) that perhaps modern day digital infrastructure can transcend the considerations early buddhists may have had for the natural world and then-contemporary human-built structures.

I used to be a data hoarder but I learned to let it go. I save the important stuff, just like the Buddhist monks do. How much of the internet is really worth saving? What will Geocities mean to anyone 50 years from now? The internet is a dynamic process evolving in real time. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man Heraclitus

I am a fan of that quote and I now personally eschew clutter. However I'm referring to the examples in the article such as the supreme court justice referencing links that no longer existed. Paraphrasing the article, >75% of links from the 90s are defunct. Sure Geocities may not have value to many, but an astonishing number of links in court rulings and law documents are leading to dead ends. I can see how this could lead to shaky ground upon which it would be more difficult to defend certain internet freedoms.

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

#69

Post by tda »

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.
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