Trevor Owens: New report from Pew finds 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. This research underscores how critical web archiving efforts are. www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

New report from Pew finds 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. This research underscores how critical web archiving efforts are. www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

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

Wow, this post is getting a lot of attention! If you are concerned about link rot you may be in in my book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation -> www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservationwww.press.jhu.edu Trevor Owens

I'll try to buy a copy the next time I have any money

There is also a free open access pre-print of the book here osf.io/preprints/li...

OSFosf.io

Oh great, thank you. I will have a good read of that, until I can afford the print version.

This fact makes it even more depressing that many large tech corporations are aggressively trying to shut down the internet archive, online libraries, and other similar information repositories due to "copyright violations." 1/2

They're so upset that people may be able to access old movies or books, many of which aren't even being officially disturbed anymore, that they're literally trying to do the equivalent of burning the library of alexandria and destroy some of the largest collections of knowledge ever created. 2/2

The tech companies aren’t the one doing that. It’s book publishers

Also, print yourself a PDF of anything you wish to have for longer than today.

tell me about it. I've been designing web sites since '95 and 99.9% of my life's work is long gone

This, and same. Sure I was paid for them, very well so sometimes. But these days I'd rather commit myself to endeavors with more staying power.

yeah man, it'll mess with your head if you dwell on it. tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of effort vanish with a tap of DEL

Extrapolate--math suggests that in 30 years, (almost) no current webpages now will exist. Which also suggests, if you want you work to survive, you should put it on paper, like a cave person. Or chisel it in stone. Because one day the whole frickin' internet is going to disappear, archives and all.

Back in my wild web designer years of the early 2000s I used to have some hardbound books like this one (link below) showcasing what was then cutting edge trends. Little did we think these books would turn themselves into veritable time capsules of an era long gone. ⏳

Personal Web Sites: Top Designers Push the Boundaries with Experimental Design and Graphics : Joe Shepter : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivearchive.org

Web design has changed a lot since the 1990s. I'm actually surprised so many old web pages are still up. It costs money to keep them active, after all.

You don't necessarily have to assume some personal webpage is gone by then. You can wipe out a TON of digital information just having Twitter go under. Or Facebook. And if historians aren't screen shooting things, we're legit going to lose a ton of historical and political event facts.

Yes, and even screenshots, like anything else that requires a device with specific programming to read it, may have a short practical shelf-life. I have whole hard-drives full of material that is virtually inaccessible except for paper copies I printed. If it was not on paper who even remembers it?

IMO we're probably living in a 'Dark Ages'. Very few records from this era will be around in 500 years... just piles "books", written by right-wing pundits.

Right - AI editing books sounds like a recipe for disaster

also everything being 'digital'... even w/o some CME event or war destroying all the tech, nobody will be able to read those formats in the future. (Oh, and "digital history" is so much easier to change. No need to burn a single book!)

I'm an Anthropologist/IT archivist working to reconstruct the 1st-ever global gaming fansite Stratics.com. We lost so much to bad actors, ownership changeovers, server migrations + bad pointers. Now we're losing what people preserved offline as they die. I'm working against the clock for recovery!

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

Public amnesia is a requirement for war by our political elites!

Oh, how will AI ever cope?

CC @augustafund.bsky.social

I think losing some things might actually be totally fine. Everything is forgotten, eventually.

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Pew. Pew pew pew. Pew.

Support archive.org

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machinearchive.org

It’s the digital era speed running the industrial capitalist failure to reinvest in critical infrastructure. Build it once, extract value to the point of collapse.

Maybe this is the sort of thing we should be using the NSA exabyte Utah Data Center for, instead of generalized domestic surveillance.

Note: by "maybe" I of course mean "abso-fucking-lutely"

Oh I know all about this.

this just gave me the jolt I needed to make my donation to the internet archive and soon wikipedia

Time to retrain some librarians? They're getting laid off anyway :(

I mean how many are people who had square space accounts thinking they were gonna set up a website for their business that never really got off the ground lol

Cool, but Heaven's Gate's website is still up & untouched. What a world.

"Ah, this looks like Late Geocities, Phase 2. You can see where the dancing baby used to be."

📌

Lost...like atemyballs webrings...in rain

I'd have assumed a much higher percentage, this is surprising

Honestly stunned it's as low as 38%

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I was a member of a forum for a few decades that was taken down last year. This was such a big issue that it hit the news. Unfortunately so much of that information was lost bc the private parts of the forum could not be archived.😭

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"Data from the BLS shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years." Prolly a shitload of BillsFreshBuffaloMeat and AuntieMarigoldsHomemadeBabyShoes that were never gonna last forever.

billsfreshbuffalomeat.com

I dunno. Given that everything is chugging along as it always was, maybe it underscores how little web archiving actually matters.

Or just, you know. Writin' shit down.

Sexually Suggestive

Labeled by Bluesky Moderation Service

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Digital decay, or removing stale content? Do I really need to access the iPad 1 user manual in 2024?

Maybe not you.

We everyone know that preserving digital content through web archiving is essential for ensuring access to information and history in the long term.

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