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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

#91

Post by throwawayboise »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #9
chovybizzass wrote: post #2

yes. i am down to HN and Reddit. Google calendar and telegram. I don't even know how to find cool stuff online anymore. Google SERPs are all business driven now unless you're research news.

I wish there was something like Reddit that could be organized by topic, but had the simplicity of HN's design instead of the monstrocity Reddit has become. My guess is it would still succumb to the Reddit Hive Mind effect without a reasonably benevolent moderation team though. For all the times I've said that HN basically does the same thing, I have to admit that it is much better about keeping it in check.

Gemini protocol might be something here. But it's probably too "techy" to get widespread traction.

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

#92

Post by undfg »

mountainb wrote: post #90
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…

The BBC publishes nothing but garbage and there are other extant sources that are more durable. It's fine to forget things. We're missing entire libraries of classical literature from great authors which would be nice to have. Missing documentary sewage isn't a tragedy. This should show us that most of the web isn't worth preserving anyway, much like McDonald's burger wrappers aren't worth preserving like sacred arti…

I remember how calling the BBC garbage a few years ago got your comment heavily downvoted here. They'd tell you that they were the best thing since sliced bread and that they were good because both the left and the right hated them, as if that meant something. Now it seems everybody is recognising the BBC for what they are: utter shite.

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

#93

Post by okareaman »

beaconstudios wrote: post #67
okareaman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I just bought a 2 terabyte drive for $55, which is mind boggling to an old salt like me. The need to store enormous amounts of real time data will keep driving storage advances. Text and image data may turn out to be a trivial percentage of the overall storage needs in the longer term.

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

#94

Post by CodeGlitch »

mountainb wrote: post #90
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…

The BBC publishes nothing but garbage and there are other extant sources that are more durable. It's fine to forget things. We're missing entire libraries of classical literature from great authors which would be nice to have. Missing documentary sewage isn't a tragedy. This should show us that most of the web isn't worth preserving anyway, much like McDonald's burger wrappers aren't worth preserving like sacred arti…

Reading one of the BBC's technical articles, a cyber security news item, they had 3 errors in the first paragraph. I didn't bother reading to the end of the article.

I'm glad I no longer pay for a TV license.

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

#95

Post by krapp »

ct0 wrote: post #5
chovybizzass wrote: post #2

yes. i am down to HN and Reddit. Google calendar and telegram. I don't even know how to find cool stuff online anymore. Google SERPs are all business driven now unless you're research news.

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 just because services replaced the need to design websites by hand. That's like believing literature ended once scribes were replaced by the printing press.

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

#96

Post by pessimizer »

throwaways885 wrote: post #78
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…

> so unless historians dig deep in third-party archives, they'd never understand where that belief came from I expect future historical tooling will exist to solve exactly this problem. Assuming Archive.org and the like nabbed it, the evidence is all there for future generations to see.

Assuming archive.org isn't shut down and deleted by court order in some future lawsuit.

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

#97

Post by blooalien »

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.

> "and please skip the tired argument that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap - we are already paying them with our data. My data is worth far more to me than the value they provide for it. Plus - I won't give money to a company who forced this Faustian bargain on me."

Not only this, but many of the largest companies these days would never remove advertising even from a paid service. It's like cable TV. They wanna charge you and advertise at you for more money.

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

#98

Post by pessimizer »

varispeed wrote: post #66
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.

We say that a lot, but it's not that cheap if you're using redundancy and backups. It's cheap if you don't care too much about the data.

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

#99

Post by PaulHoule »

stickfigure wrote: post #87
PaulHoule wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's depressing. I know somebody who started a business that was successful for a while and then failed. Spammers got control of the domain and now it is full of ads for a dangerous diet drug. What makes my blood boil is that it impugns the integrity of the founder who is a decent person who has nothing to do with that scam.

This actually happened to me: https://www.voo.st/ We shut down the business an abandoned the domain. Someone registered the domain, created a similar-looking website by hand (recycling a lot of the text and images), and added spam. It even has my old company address. This is a .st domain, about $35/yr. The web design work cost something too. More than I would have expected the link juice from a single website to be w…

The traffic you get from people following links is measurable (and real!) The traffic you get from "link juice" is imagined.

The original PageRank paper assumed that PageRank approximated the distribution of views on web pages assuming that people followed links at random.

If Google wanted to know what people are viewing today, they don't need to collect a link graph and do matrix math. They can measure it directly with Chrome, Google Analytics and data exhaust from the advertising platform.

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

#100

Post by krapp »

throwawayboise wrote: post #91
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was something like Reddit that could be organized by topic, but had the simplicity of HN's design instead of the monstrocity Reddit has become. My guess is it would still succumb to the Reddit Hive Mind effect without a reasonably benevolent moderation team though. For all the times I've said that HN basically does the same thing, I have to admit that it is much better about keeping it in check.

Gemini protocol might be something here. But it's probably too "techy" to get widespread traction.

The Gemini protocol will never gain widespread traction because its designed to appeal to a specific tech-contrarian anti-modernist mindset with restrictions that most people won't find appealing or useful.

And as soon as the mainstream knows about it, and it no longer feels quirky and niche, it will be declared dead and abandoned anyway.

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