John Gramlich: "The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages." But online content often disappears, too. How often? 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer available today.

"The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages." But online content often disappears, too. How often? 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer available today.

When Online Content Disappearswww.pewresearch.org A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

A huge number of academic and research pages I've bookmarked have disappeared, not to mention the five year projects that are report repositories and vapourise at the end of funding.

2013 is when the internet peaked. Google worked as intended instead of bringing up sponsored content and AI falsehoods as the top search results. Youtube was great. Social media wasn't overrun by right wing trolls and Nazis. News sites weren't littered with clickbait taboola garbage.

plus now google will just give you AI snippets now…

Well that sounds like an additional reason it's harder to find information online.

One reason no one should ever scan an archive, put it online, and throw away the original material.

Keep the books!

Obligatory reminder that Wikipedia and particularly @archive.org have anticipated this problem for the last couple of decades, are open for your involvement in the archival initiative and take donations if you don't also want to devote more time than a brief post bemoaning the current situation. 🙏

📌

Time to join the Digital Preservation Coalition? #dpc www.dpconline.org

Home - Digital Preservation Coalitionwww.dpconline.org

Makes it hard to track the true effects of trolls on elections. Win win for the bad guys.

Absolutely fascinating! I recall reading just 15-ish years ago the proposition that we were "at the end of prehistory" because now we'd have day to day information on what nearly every person in the world was up to. And that being a historian would be more and more data science. But bit rot is real!

great stats! people create websites and think its easy to get impressions but forget that a lot of work needs to be done to attract impressions, SEO is key here.

I'm trying to reconstruct a 26yr history of the 1st gaming global fansite, Stratics.com. We've lost so much data, volunteer records, articles, that even as an IT archivist, I'm struggling. On top of that, it seems our past owners have passed away taking their remaining data with them. So sad.

Stratics Central - MMORPG Strategy and Statisticsstratics.com MMORPG Strategy and Statistics

To protect what I have recovered from further loss I have to take it OFF THE INTERNET! It cannot be in the cloud where Google locks out authors, tech platforms SELL the private data, and people just delete it. Could we someday make a reliable archive of our history? At this point it seems unlikely.

I'm studying human culture online as a prof Anthropologist. I'm trying to reconstruct, using my archivist skills, a culture that needs to be documented and preserved. It's only 40! We did this! We moved culture into a virtual world, but it is being erased. We need to research ways to PRESERVE it!

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