[HN Gopher] Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
___________________________________________________________________
Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
Author : timmytokyo
Score : 199 points
Date : 2021-06-30 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| developeron29 wrote:
| "The benefits of internet far outrides its shortcomings"
|
| Stop being pessimistic
| kylestlb wrote:
| 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 wanting to improve
| any of these issues, etc.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| 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 discussion, the Atlantic also
| touches on censorship in all the wrong ways, re-iterating the
| too-common view that censorship is good as long as the good
| guys do it. They at least argue that this censorship should be
| transparent and censored works still accessible in some way,
| but they seem to not understand the nature of what they're
| talking about.
|
| Censored works aren't censored to protect the public. They're
| censored to protect the rich and powerful. That's why "right to
| be forgotten" really exists. That's why Google and Youtube and
| Twitter and Facebook quash anything that goes against the
| accepted narrative in any given field. They aren't protecting
| the public from dangerous misinformation. No one gives a shit
| about the public. They're protecting the financial and
| political interests of some very powerful people.
|
| Given this, talk of a "poison cabinet" only illustrates
| ignorance of the issue. The Memory Hole cannot be divorced from
| the censorship process, it's a core part of it. If people can
| still find the information in some form, it's not censored
| enough to make the people it threatened happy.
|
| And this leads to the final point, which is that the real
| reason the web is "rotting" isn't link rot, it's censorship on
| the part of tech monopolies, due to their joined-at-the-hip
| relationship with every large corporation and industry
| imaginable due to advertising and other deals. The fact that
| links die doesn't matter much: you can just repost the
| material. The fact that links ARE ACTIVELY KILLED to suppress
| their information is a much more serious problem, and one that
| doesn't have an easy solution besides full breakup of the tech
| monopolies.
| pfraze wrote:
| 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 spreading
| rumors (let's say that you watch CP) and spends time and
| money to get that rumor top of any SEO and forum thread,
| what's the right course of action? How good are you going to
| feel about using speech to counteract that when the result is
| a Google search giving your denial in spot 1 and the
| accusation in spot 2?
|
| We all have to grapple with power and the ability to abuse
| it, but I don't think it's effective to say power is
| fundamentally wrong. The conversation is more nuanced than
| that and has to be viewed as systems with checks on power,
| which means specific design-thinking.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > 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.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| You're definitely right, but I was under the impression
| they exist to generate profit for shareholders, not act
| as a social service. Capitalism is a system for
| maximizing value extraction, not altruistic endeavors.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Have you ever had to deal with the court system? It is
| VERY slow, expensive as hell, and utterly frustrating.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > just to protect themselves
|
| To protect themselves _from the public_. Whether it 's
| because consumers might take their business (and their
| data) elsewhere in disgust at what a particular platform
| is turning into, or because democratically elected
| lawmakers could start imposing sanctions or new
| regulations.
|
| Companies are always looking out for themselves, that's a
| given. But that doesn't mean their actions are completely
| divorced from public opinion.
| [deleted]
| ballenf wrote:
| Maybe the reason it feels impossible to stem the tide of link
| rot is that it's takes tremendous energy to constantly increase
| the entropy of a system. And that energy has opportunity cost
| that no one really wants to talk about.
|
| The article has the unstated assumption that eternal
| preservation of all writing ever is a net benefit. I think it's
| worth having a discussion on that point.
| kylestlb wrote:
| I disagree that the unstated assumption is eternal
| preservation of all writing. IMO the author is clearly
| focusing on official or semi-official published information,
| not necessarily what you and I write on places like HN.
| bentcorner wrote:
| And there's the irony that's pointed out in the article as
| well - official documentation on government websites may
| not last past an elected official's term, yet blithe
| comments on a social media site that are later regretted
| may last forever.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| > Maybe the reason it feels impossible to stem the tide of
| link rot is that it's takes tremendous energy to constantly
| increase the entropy of a system.
|
| I suppose you meant "decrease"
| makomk wrote:
| 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.)
| tda wrote:
| 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.
| deadalus wrote:
| Wayback Machine censors many websites(like 4chan) from being
| 'saved'. Wayback Machine also removes previously archived
| videos/websites in certain cases. They are not neutral.
| thrashh wrote:
| Don't spread misinformation. The Wayback Machine is not
| censoring 4chan. 4chan is 'censoring' the Wayback Machine.
|
| https://www.4chan.org/robots.txt
|
| Also, I let a domain of mine expire and the new domain
| owner (which just plastered ads) had a robots.txt that
| retroactively removed my "previously archived website" from
| the Wayback Machine.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Don't spread misinformation.
|
| No you.
|
| > The Wayback Machine is not censoring 4chan. 4chan is
| 'censoring' the Wayback Machine.
|
| 4chan is not the operator of the server at
| web.archive.org. Compliance with robots.txt restrictions
| is 100% the Internet Archive's fault.
| Zababa wrote:
| Fortunately 4chan has (unofficial) archives, but some
| content was probably lost.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I mean yes, if you are extremely motivated. But the wayback
| machine is pretty klunky and slow, honestly. And there's no
| good "diff" view that summarizes the changes to a URL over
| time AFAIK.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Slow, yes. Klunky? Absolutely not. When you make a request
| to the Internet Archive, you're searching through a massive
| amount of data. The fact that it only takes a few seconds
| to pull up a decade-old webpage is amazing.
| jandrese wrote:
| This is true, but they're also taking on an absolutely
| monumental task on a shoestring budget. I continue to be
| amazed at what they are able to accomplish. There aren't
| many heroes on the internet, but the Internet Archive team
| qualifies.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _But the wayback machine is pretty klunky and slow,
| honestly._
|
| This is very true. Sometimes it takes 5-10 seconds to load
| the calendar view for an archived page, and another 5-10,
| or more, to load a snapshot.
|
| They have a _ton_ of data to manage with limited resources,
| but it still seems it should be possible to go faster than
| this. If there 's just not enough budget for I/O, maybe
| they could offer a donate-for-data-dump option, where you
| can donate in exchange for loading data of interest (say,
| BBC archives) into a storage medium or query engine of
| one's choice, so one could do research at a much faster
| pace.
| mountainb wrote:
| 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 artifacts. Most web and social media
| content is worth less than said greasy burger wrappers.
| undfg wrote:
| 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.
| idrios wrote:
| A few years ago, any comment that didn't add new insight to
| a topic would get downvoted. I remember once reading a
| comment where the response was a quip, and someone replied
| "this response was funny but we don't want this site to
| become Reddit so I downvoted you".
| lez wrote:
| I see this as a more general pattern on HN: Opinions not-
| yet-adopted by academia are often downvoted instead of
| being argued with. This stifles innovation because
| alternative opinions do not even show up in the casual
| reader's screen.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Absent an explanation of why I've annoyed people, I get
| as much of a dopamine hit from downvotes as upvotes. I'd
| rather be polarising than forgettable.
|
| Whenever I take an unpopular stance I remind myself of
| Rick Sanchez's wise words, "Your boos mean nothing, I've
| seen what makes you cheer".
| Smithalicious wrote:
| Me too, I think a lot of my most upvoted comments are
| just truisms and preaching to the choir, whereas a lot of
| the more insightful things I've said quickly get greyed
| out.
| skybrian wrote:
| "Someone said it on Hacker News" carries no weight. Why
| should anyone take our comments seriously if they don't
| recognize the username? I don't see this as a bug.
|
| Better to post links to trusted sources and let people
| judge for themselves.
| tooltower wrote:
| What other more durable sources do you recommend?
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| 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.
| dotBen wrote:
| The BBC (News's) tech section isn't aimed at you.
| Inaccuracies shouldn't be there but often they will dumb
| down or gloss over stuff for the mainstream audience they
| are aiming at.
|
| You notice it cos you are in tech, but the same happens in
| financial news, science and even sport. Go read a tech
| publication.
|
| For shits and giggle I did once try to get a technical
| story on how to copy DVD's published - it got very heavily
| edited!
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1987665.stm
|
| _(I 'm a former + early BBC News website employee)_
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Aside: That old version of BBC News is an absolute gem of
| history. Especially looking at some of the recommended
| sidebar stories:
|
| > Britons 'baffled over euro rate'
|
| > Wireless internet arrives in China
|
| > Mobile spam on the rise
|
| Fascinating to see how much our problems have stayed the
| same, despite the changing context.
|
| I hope this is considered 'archived' and not 'forgotten'.
| jandrese wrote:
| It has always been a constant of journalism that you read
| an article in your field and go "Wow, this is terrible,
| they got all of the details wrong". But then you turn
| around and trust the reporting on everything outside of
| your field of expertise.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| > 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Assuming archive.org isn't shut down and deleted by court
| order in some future lawsuit.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Donate money to archive.org! Some of the FAANG companies match
| donations to it too.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| 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.>
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| you're worried about....the ads? Having ads around doesn't make
| the content any less valuable. We're talking about the content
| itself still being available, who cares if there's some ads
| keeping the system up if all those live concerts and how-to
| vids are preserved forever
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Who is going to watch live concert footage with ads jammed
| into it? For those of us who grew up in the age of TV,
| advertising was clearly a slippery slope where they
| constantly increased the ad content until it was beyond
| unbearable (they even deleted parts of shows to make room for
| more ads!) YouTube will likely do the same when they decide
| to force all of us to watch unblockable and unskipable ads to
| access content that they didn't even create or curate. All
| they have done is provide a network effect monopoly that
| hoovered up the majority of content.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| The ads make content less valuable. They distract and mislead
| and manipulate emotions, especially when the youtuber
| sponsors something during the video itself. The content isn't
| abstract and isolated, the content and the ads come as a
| bundle. The digital procedural product placement on the way
| will make this 10x worse
| redisman wrote:
| It's really up to you who cares about something to archive it.
| I managed to find a torrent of early days video games from my
| region that has almost been lost to time. Luckily I found a
| discord and could coax someone to hop on to seed it. If I had
| waited 10 more years they might have been gone for good.
|
| Everyone's assuming that data now stays on the internet forever
| because it's so massive. It's usually one or two people who
| keep the flame alive
| robotnikman wrote:
| I set up a server specifically for downloading Youtube videos
| from all my playlists on a daily basis just for this reason. At
| some point I got fed up at seeing all the missing videos on my
| playlists (and not even knowing what was removed)
| majormajor wrote:
| 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 fact, I'm incredibly greatful that I grew up _before_ all
| the random shit that I threw out there as part of my youth was
| subjected to obsessive cataloging and archival efforts.
| codingdave wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| There will probably always be niche sources for specific
| "how to" information. YouTube is currently a low-effort way
| to make that generally available in video format, but it's
| certainly not the only viable solution, and the information
| you can get from a specific enthusiast site or forum is
| often better and more detailed.
| majormajor wrote:
| Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives
| to check out those old how-to books, they're using
| contemporary sources on Youtube instead.
|
| And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in
| fifty years.
|
| I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes
| some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to
| have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my
| generation. It might temporarily have a lot of monetary
| value near my death - when other copies have already been
| lost - but to someone born fifty years after me? What use
| would pulp fiction from the 80s be to many of them?
|
| My parents and uncles are in a bit of disbelief of how
| _little_ even I care about the Beatles already, after all.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Well not caring for the Beatle is like not caring for
| Mozart. Bad taste is always an option in a free society.
| majormajor wrote:
| Even people who care about Mozart's music largely have no
| idea how much other stuff from the time period they might
| have enjoyed that was lost, and that hypothetical loss is
| not ruining their life at all.
|
| We don't live dramatically longer or have dramatically
| larger memories than our ancestors, so things necessarily
| have to get lost and replaced by the new things that have
| been created since then.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| These subjective questions are pointless to try and answer.
|
| The idea is that a future person could freely deep dive
| through a rich well indexed history of media about whatever
| specifically interests _them_
|
| I wish people would stop trying to assess the value of a
| given piece of media and just tag and archive the stuff.
|
| For instance, high quality footage of live music from 100
| years ago would be very interesting to some.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Each individual meme or video might not be important, but
| then I don't think future historians are going to spend much
| time studying individual artifacts in detail in the same way
| that current historians do. We live in the age of big data
| and I think future historians will be focused on aggregating
| and automatically analysing that data. They probably won't be
| reading your comment or mine but they might analyse large
| sets of HN comments with a view to drawing conclusions about
| how particular demographics act, think and feel today. And if
| large swathes of those comments are lost the conclusions will
| be skewed, particularly if the loss is not random.
|
| Our society is characterised by the constant generation and
| exchange of massive amounts of information. It's one of the
| things that sets us apart from previous generations.
| Preserving only a small subset of that data that we deem
| worthy or important will not allow future generations to
| fully understand today's society.
| krapp wrote:
| >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?
|
| You might have a better understanding of the culture that
| produced them. You might appreciate a work of art that would
| otherwise not exist. We have graffiti from Pompeii, we know
| Ea-nasir sold cheap copper in ancient Ur 3700-odd years ago,
| but we've lost countless works of literature, music and film,
| some by the greatest masters of their age. What artifacts of
| culture survive the scouring sands of time is often a matter
| of happenstance, rather than quality.
|
| Chances are almost everything our species has produced
| culturally, scientifically and artistically - the whole
| corpus of our knowledge output over the last century - is
| going to vanish within a generation or two anyway, simply
| because the digital foundation into which we've transferred
| so much of it is brittle and ephemeral. If we want to leave
| anything behind for future generations at all besides climate
| change, pollution and nuclear waste, we should save as much
| as possible rather than only what we consider to be relevant.
| Forbo wrote:
| Minor nitpick, it was ~1750 BC, so that would be around
| 3700 years ago.
| krapp wrote:
| Oops, fair enough.
| mdoms wrote:
| You don't know what's important until much later. That's what
| makes archiving difficult.
|
| Also, important to whom?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
| gentleman11 wrote:
| They won't stop collecting your data even if you pay them
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on
| YouTube.
|
| Download it? This continues to be not difficult for YouTube.
|
| > I suspect that one day, they will make their ads unblockable
| by embedding them in the video files.
|
| That's fine. I honestly wish they would because most of the
| hangs in YouTube I experience when the stream changes to an ad,
| and then changes back. If it was embedded in the video then the
| stream wouldn't be interrupted.
|
| If I hate the ads that much one can edit them out after it's
| downloaded.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "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.
| anoncake wrote:
| Paying signals that you have disposable income, making
| advertising to you more profitable.
| [deleted]
| varispeed wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Cataloging and indexing and searchability are also not
| cheap if you are doing all of that on your own time.
| sp332 wrote:
| The 2014 Vulture interview with David Milch, where he reads
| form an unreleased Boss Tweed script, may be gone for good.
| https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/14096229692828753...
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > 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/
| bluedays wrote:
| Project Xanadu was an attempt to fix this, but unfortunately it
| suffered from the creator wanting to capitalize on it's success.
| Which is, I think, why it ultimately failed.
| okareaman wrote:
| Buddhists chuckle at the notion of permanence and go back to
| constructing sand mandalas
| kragen wrote:
| Buddhists have preserved most of the Tripitaka for 2500 years,
| and for the first 500 years it was memorized and transmitted
| orally from generation to generation. Buddhist monks today
| spend significant amounts of their time memorizing parts of it.
| Printed, it's about 12000 pages; it's been translated into many
| languages, but not all of it has been translated into English
| yet. Thanissaro Bhikkhu has been working on it for 20 years,
| publishing his translations under CC-BY, and may finish the job
| before he dies. Aside from its value to devotees, the Tripitaka
| is one of our best historical sources about everyday life in
| South Asia 2500 years ago.
|
| The invention of wood block printing 1300 years ago in the Tang
| was apparently specifically motivated by the desire to preserve
| and reproduce Buddhist sutras; the oldest surviving documents
| printed with movable type, from 900 years ago, are also
| Buddhist texts.
|
| Of course the Tripitaka is not permanent; it will be lost some
| day. But you seem to be implicitly claiming that Buddhists do
| not apply effort to preserving information and in particular
| textual records, because they know that ultimately they will be
| lost. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite, and believing
| your implicit claim would require almost complete ignorance of
| Buddhism, printing technology, and South Asian classical
| studies.
| datameta wrote:
| 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.
| okareaman wrote:
| 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
| datameta wrote:
| 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.
| okareaman wrote:
| Google's recent invention of text links should help this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_text#:~:text=%22Now%
| 20i....
|
| # signifies an anchor
|
| :~:text= signifies a text link
|
| %22Now%20is%20the%20time%20for,21%20(1918). says show me
| the text between "Now is the time for" and "21 (1918)."
| beaconstudios wrote:
| buddhists fundamentally reject clinging to the idea of
| permanence as a source of inevitable misery when your wishes
| go unfulfilled.
| okareaman wrote:
| 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
| beaconstudios wrote:
| 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!
| okareaman wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| Accepting the impermanence of all things is an important
| lesson, but it is not an excuse for nihilism, because even
| impermanent things can have value, however finite, and the
| impossibility of true permanence doesn't have to distract from
| realising finite value while it lasts.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Indeed yes, however much we may dislike it, change is the only
| constant. Of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't bother
| archiving, but there is no need to fret over saving every byte
| out there on the web.
|
| Entropy is king. Eventually all information loses its
| coherency.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I expected the article to deal more with the rotting _landscape_
| of the internet, the rotting of our choices of content, the poor
| selection of links on the 1st page of any search engine.... I am
| less concerned with the fact that a link breaks than I am with
| what it says about the content that was there, is no longer
| there.
| rchaud wrote:
| Links are the backbone of the internet. Archive.org is a huge
| asset, but it relies on individuals being prescient enough to
| archive pages that might be lost to time. That's not scalable.
| Plenty of people will visit Wayback Machine to pull up an old
| page that's gone to the big 404 in the sky, but they won't
| actively submit links to archive themselves.
|
| The bad design and low quality content is a symptom of the
| Internet's broken underlying economics. That's a human problem,
| not a tech problem.
| bullen wrote:
| The article does not scroll on an older Chrome... the internet is
| indeed rotten.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Or on Firefox.
| fleddr wrote:
| It's not a technology problem, it's an incentive problem.
|
| Had the web somehow been centralized (I have no idea what that
| would even look like), content still would not be archived, it
| would be constantly changed, and subject to censorship. Just like
| in a decentralized web, perhaps even more so.
|
| Archiving costs lots of money (and costs keep growing if you only
| add and never take away), can be highly challenging (in the case
| of web apps or complex dependencies), whilst providing zero
| immediate reward for the organization carrying this heavy load.
| Not only is there no incentive, many couldn't even afford to if
| they wanted to.
|
| And it gets worse still. Digital archiving means paying forever.
| Imagine paying a 100 years of electricity, hardware replacements,
| migrations. The entity (business, person) is long gone before
| that.
|
| As a ridiculous example of this: Facebook has several very large
| idle content data centers. Mega scale buildings full of servers
| storing photos of Facebook users they haven't accessed in years,
| and likely never will again. Yet should a user do this, they
| expect the photo to still be there.
|
| That's why I believe the problem should be addressed with more
| pragmatism. Focus on things of unquestionable long term value,
| and think of a good solution for this smaller scope.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| This is why there are sites like WayBackMachine. I suggest people
| keep donating to them as well if they want to preserve internet
| history.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Visiting an old forum and all the pictures will be gone because,
| surprise, free image hosting doesn't make economic sense.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The web forum that I frequent most,
| https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com , has a policy of not
| allowing embedded images but requiring them to be attached on
| each post. The forum has been active for well over a decade now
| (site was founded in 2004) and has a thriving community that
| continues to grow. It is the community that keeps the forum
| alive instead of just one random company (although it
| technically is a company). This helps prevent link rot. Forums
| seem anachronistic in 2021, but they have massive benefits
| versus the gigantic platforms like Facebook or Reddit or
| Twitter, and the quality of the discourse and analysis is far
| higher. There are a few ads, but they're very unobtrusive.
|
| (Also, Twitter posts are often linked, but usually the text is
| copied for archival purposes.)
|
| My experience with Wikipedia, forums such as those, and Wayback
| Machine and arxiv.org make me think that people will do a lot
| of stuff basically for free and that by building communities,
| you don't need extremely clever trustless incentive systems
| like Blockchain or major paywalls (although granted, the forum
| does have something like a paywall for unverified pre-public
| info) or massive platforms with multi billion dollar companies
| in order to disseminate information, analysis, news, etc. Best
| practices of web forums from the 2000s (active moderation, a
| sense of common purpose, expectations of non-toxicness, etc),
| are a really good solution.
| [deleted]
| uniqueuid wrote:
| 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/internetarchive/heritrix3), but there's a
| great little ecosystem with tools such as webrecorder and
| warcprox.
|
| Still, I've read through the code of these tools and am feeling
| that they are failing in the face of the modern web with single
| page apps, mobile phone apps and walled gardens. Even newer
| iterations with browser automation are getting increasingly
| throttled and blocked and excluded from walled gardens.
|
| Perhaps the time has come for a coordinated, decentralized but
| omnipresent approach to archival.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I think "right to be forgotten" is important and I'm generally
| against everlasting social media posts, but for copyrighted
| works, we really need a centralized Library of Congress that
| acts to archive these. In order for that to happen there needs
| to be an equivalent "publishing" mechanism for the web - where
| the user says - I created something and I want it to be
| archived. This would cover things that exist behind a paywall
| or are only delivered as newsletters.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > increasingly throttled and blocked and excluded from walled
| garden
|
| I keep thinking back to Jacob Applebaum's stance of "facebook
| and the other walled gardens are the real dark web."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 button to indicate
| that a page is done "loading" but with automated capturing you
| can't really know that the page is done or that you got a good
| capture. That ended the project right there.
| glasss wrote:
| I'm completely out of the loop on something like this, but
| could you in theory apply some kind of ML to identify the end
| of pages to assist with good page captures?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Probably. Certainly the more you spent on it the better you
| could do.
|
| At the time I was most bothered by the slow load times of
| web pages and blaming this phenomenon:
|
| https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/samplemax4.htm
|
| particularly that if you take the max of N random
| variables, the expectation value you get gets worse as N
| increases -- that is, the page isn't done loading until the
| slowest http request completes.
|
| So I saw the "knowing when the page is done" problem as
| being particularly core, and it would be if the goal was to
| "win the race" against a conventional web browser.
|
| If you were (say) preloading all the links submitted to
| hacker news you might be able to tolerate the system taking
| 5 minutes to process an incoming page. (See archive.is)
|
| Today I've noticed that sites like Wired are giving up on
| complaining about my anti-track and ad-blocker and they
| just load the page partially which would drive me crazy if
| I was serious about debugging.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Honestly, it would be a better use of surplus resources than
| crypto mining.
|
| If only there are a way to algorithmically tie a proof of work
| for a new cryptocurrency to archival of the internet in a way
| that wouldn't be easily gamed (by people archiving easy to
| access content or highly redundant archival of trivia).
| meowkit wrote:
| https://spec.filecoin.io/algorithms/pos/
| have_faith wrote:
| Knowing that it decays is what prompts us to try and save the
| bits worth saving.
|
| I don't sit in the camp that everything digital must be preserved
| and that it's a disaster if it isn't. I try not to fight entropy
| in it's many manifestations. It's a shame when content disappears
| but I think it's also healthy to just accept it. We tend to only
| frame information disappearing in a negative light because we can
| always imagine a scenario where that information could have been
| valuable to someone, and that is a valid concern, I just don't
| think it's helpful to view it as the internet going into some
| downward rotting spiral and therefore every single 0 and 1 must
| be preserved.
|
| The major problems of the internet seem to be almost entirely
| cultural currently.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Ironically, deleting stuff on the web is technically REDUCING
| its entropy.
| debt wrote:
| I always thought something like Ethereum could solve this type of
| thing; that is, if the content itself lived inside the
| blockchain. Obviously for larger formats that wouldn't work, but
| for many text based or lower resolution image formats, it
| wouldn't be too much overhead to just inject it all into the
| blockchain.
| fridif wrote:
| Here's an idea, try to make things that need to survive into
| static downloadable content.
|
| "But I'm the consumer of a service!"
|
| --Ask the service provider to open source their work.
| jessehattabaugh wrote:
| I think the publishing media that predate the web all had the
| same problem; posters get torn down, newspapers burn, even stone
| carvings weather. Hardly a new, or possibly even unnecessary
| phenomenon.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Hashes are the answer.
|
| How they get implemented in solving this problem is the question
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/Trpkg
| platz wrote:
| Fungi serve an important role in nature.
| canadianwriter wrote:
| I actually implemented a rule for my website: anytime I write
| anything and cite a link, I always also include the internet
| archive url as well just in case. If it's not been archived yet I
| submit it to be.
|
| as an example:
|
| "You don't have to trust me on this one, here's an article with
| [a bunch of data] | [*Archive link in case of link rot]"
|
| from: https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/virtue.html
|
| It's not perfect, but it helps reduce some of the issue.
|
| Other than that solutions are incredibly hard to come by - you
| need institutions to preserve urls - through tech changes and the
| like, when they have very little incentive to do so. Eg. making
| sure they implement a redirect from the http to https sounds
| simple enough, but not everyone did it. Also if they switch CMSs
| and the like.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > a rule for my website
|
| Note that you should also have a rule to save the link content
| locally, to avoid single-point-of-failure problems in the
| unlikely-but-catastrophic case that archive.org itself goes
| down. (Cf the attempts to attack them over their National
| Emergency Library programme last year.)
| dang wrote:
| I've changed the baity title to a representative phrase from the
| article body [1], but it is maybe a bit too narrow now, relative
| to what the article is really about. Suggestions for a better
| title are welcome. Sometimes we use the HTML doc title but "The
| Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination" is worse!
|
| [1] That's the best way to get a better title.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| But at least it's apparent that an end must be in sight for
| internet as we know it. That there's still other forms of
| internet waiting to be discovered.
| ericra wrote:
| For those hitting the "monthly article limit" paywall, this can
| always be bypassed on The Atlantic by opening the link in a
| private window.
| abeppu wrote:
| 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, for guarding against "published", supposedly static material
| disappearing, or changing silently, and for removing a short list
| of organizations from being responsible for preserving content,
| IPFS or something like it seems well-suited. Anyone who cares to
| preserve something can. Any change is noticeable.
| budibase wrote:
| I think it's important to support tools that are driven with
| people in mind, rather than money. I like where Brave is going:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593360
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think out obsession with copyright and attribution of ideas
| isn't helping. Many times you'll see people reference a page or
| PDF, which long ago became a broken link. Not one person bothers
| to paraphrase or copy relevant sections from it. And the wayback
| machine can't cover everything.
| tgbugs wrote:
| The whole architecture of the internet is inside out. People have
| become numb to the insanity of encountering null pointers
| multiple times per day. This is understandable since the inside
| out structure is what allowed the web to grow quickly, but it
| will also be what ultimately dooms it as a real lasting store for
| knowledge.
|
| The problem is that the foundations are shifting sands, and we
| need something that has significantly more integrity at the
| bottom layer, we can't just bolt URNs on as an afterthought. Some
| organizations are able to maintain persistent data over time, but
| it is in spite of the technology, not because of it.
|
| I will also note that a world where it is possible to delete
| things is a world where individuals can be made to have written
| anything in the past. On the internet, at a certain point the
| past can be fabricated from whole cloth.
|
| edit: and ironically, the issue is that this is because the
| internet wasn't actually academic enough in its original design.
| ganzuul wrote:
| We should have kept developing Usenet. Handing control over to
| web browser providers was a mistake.
| samatman wrote:
| This is why I think Twitter made a mistake in using the normal
| suspension mechanism to ban @realDonaldTrump.
|
| Not passing judgement on the decision to take away his posting
| privileges. But by suspending POTUS, everything he posted during
| his term in office is just... gone. Every hot link to anything he
| said, on any website, is broken.
|
| This is an enormous loss to any historian of the era. He was
| using Twitter as his main microphone to speak to the world, and
| all that content is, while not _lost_ lost, thoroughly and
| permanently scrambled.
|
| It would have been better to just lock him out of the account,
| publish a statement that the @realDonaldTrump account is now
| permanently archived, and that any new account he tried to open
| will be suspended.
| RGamma wrote:
| This is why I'm building/curating my personal archive with stuff
| that I think may be worthwhile saving (not only for myself
| necessarily).
|
| Perhaps there will be many personal archives like mine that one
| day can be shared in a similar vein to copy parties.
|
| We will need to treat the information we find online with its
| impermanence in mind (as authors, making things easy to copy, and
| consumers, copying stuff).
|
| Perhaps it is this mindset that, when sufficiently prevalent,
| could make the internet more like a library again; weed out the
| garbage und curate the nuggets.
|
| Btw I think archive.org is doing God's work but I don't believe
| any amount of coding and crawling will be able to save everything
| (nor should it). It can capture some raw data for (future AI?)
| historians to sift through though.
| ladyattis wrote:
| I feel that the Internet as an archive isn't really feasible. At
| best, it can augment existing archival efforts such as public
| libraries. The fact people keep pushing off to webhosting what
| should be put into a library is a grave misunderstanding of the
| use cases for the Internet.
| overgard wrote:
| I doubt people will ever care about this enough for it to have
| momentum, but there are well known technological solutions:
| content addressable file storage. If you do that the url is
| always tied to the file content itself. Of course this requires
| documents to actually be documents. So I don't think it works for
| any modern business model.
| Justin_K wrote:
| I would simplify it as SEO rot has ruined the internet.
| djoldman wrote:
| > 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 the will of the publisher
| to spend the time and/or money to continue to host it.
|
| Depending on links to work eternally is a mistake. The problem is
| not the link rot, it is the bad assumption.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| This is why when I see something I like on a website, I might
| bookmark it, but I'm also saving it locally.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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 worth.
|
| What we really need is some sort of DNS record or meta
| content we can add that tells search engines "this domain is
| being abandoned, destroy all link juice".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Domains, if not outright sold by the owner, should die then.
| junon wrote:
| Or ICANN can create policies about domain squatting like GP
| described.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Or the FDA could put alternative-health scammers in jail.
|
| Back in the 1950s they put Wilhem Reich in jail, where he
| died. L. Ron Hubbard got the hint and left the country
| and when no country was safe he went to sea.
|
| Today people like Dr. Oz run alt-health scams
| continuously and nobody seems to go to jail or even get a
| fine.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| And never be possible to register ever again? I feel like
| most easy-to-type domains would have been permanently
| expended in the early days of the web.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You wish there was some way you could make the links go
| away...
| jl6 wrote:
| Nodes in keywordspace don't die with the businesses that
| created them. The popularity of domains and links and words
| and phrases are permanently altered by the existence of the
| business. It's a digital footprint like how a real-world
| business leaves a physical footprint. Some footprints are
| harmless - just a memory of activity that once happened.
| Other footprints cause lasting harm, like contaminated soil.
|
| Abandoned formerly-popular domains create a kind of long-tail
| info-environmental impact, just like an abandoned warehouse
| can become a real-world hazard.
|
| Maybe we need a digital superfund process.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| 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.
| pfraze wrote:
| Somehow I'm replying to you twice, but this time I agree and
| wanted to note that libraries are curated spaces as well.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway_egbs wrote:
| The article is about link rot, not cultural rot.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And it seems to overlook a pretty straightforward question:
| in the era of the search engine, how much of an issue is link
| rot?
|
| I've hit bad links before. Four out of five times, I can do a
| general search for the title of the document that should have
| been at the link or the quoted excerpt that the document I'm
| reading pulled from the link, and I get a clone of the
| document posted somewhere else.
| ct0 wrote:
| 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.
| jabl wrote:
| FWIW, Siemens recently bought hackaday (or well, Siemens
| bought a company called Supplyframe which was the owner of
| Hackaday), so lets see how long that will last..
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| ulber wrote:
| Yeah, the internet is bigger now - all of the weird fringe
| stuff from enthusiasts is still there and there's even more
| of it. One thing that has happened is that the mainstream
| is there too now, so if you don't venture outside that its
| easier to not see the more interesting stuff. In the old
| days, when just having a "homepage" placed you a bit
| outside the norm, stumbling on something non-mainstream was
| more of a given.
| krapp wrote:
| And the mainstream has become more interesting as a
| result. It's not uncommon to watch anime now, D&D and
| video games are no longer niche, people's interests are
| becoming more diverse as media is no longer being
| gatekept by communities, geography or publishers, and
| everything becomes available to everyone. People might
| see that as a negative, the Eternal September effect
| eating their favorite thing, but I see it as a positive.
| Avamander wrote:
| > Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the
| internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant
| space.
|
| Have they or have you stopped looking? I'd say the former.
| agent008t wrote:
| I used to go online to escape the boring, unimaginative
| people and the world they create. Now I have to disconnect to
| escape them.
| TheFreim wrote:
| You have to know where to look online, very rare these
| days.
| Avamander wrote:
| You either have to visit aggregating sites that have likeminded
| people (HN/Reddit/Obscure FB groups/Group chats/Forums) or know
| exactly what you're looking for.
| mycall wrote:
| Google still works, you just need to be very specific on your
| search criteria (e.g. site:). I do agree on the premise that
| good quality data, art and content has been lost to the winds
| of time.
| rchaud wrote:
| Needing to use 'site:______.com' in the search query defeats
| the purpose of an internet search engine.
|
| I agree that it is necessary today, due to the sheer amount
| of useless sites that pop up on page 1 of the search. I wish
| Reddit invested more into making their internal site search
| better. If people did their searches directly on websites,
| Google would have an incentive to improve search results so
| it wasn't always the same 10-20 websites topping the list for
| nearly every query.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| Yahoo did this in the 1990s and it was cool for a while, but
| the net got too big to maintain the directory. There was an
| open alternative but it got inundated by spam of course.
| nishparadox wrote:
| I exactly had the same thought few weeks back on Twitter.
| Since I have ditched the whole 'social media bubble' for my
| mental health, it seems sometimes I wish there was some sort
| of HN-like aggregator for Tweets from my favorite topics and
| people.
| zanderwohl wrote:
| Reddit has been pushing to be like other social media sites
| now. They've added profile pictures and avatars, not to
| mention they're pushing video content like nothing else.
| They've got livestreaming and try to saturate your front page
| with as much video as possible. They've also changed the way
| their app handles video links to be more like TikTok or
| YouTube.
|
| It used to be a lot like HN - discussions around links to
| articles. I wish there was a community with the feel of HN
| with the wide net of Reddit.
|
| It feels like all social media is converging; Snapchat,
| Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, all an endless
| stream of ai-curated short videos that you can swipe through
| over and over.
| Avamander wrote:
| > It feels like all social media is converging; Snapchat,
| Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, all an
| endless stream of ai-curated short videos that you can
| swipe through over and over.
|
| It's likely that AI curation is the future because no
| humans can shift through the vast amounts of data and
| content being made. Things that can't keep up without
| curation or with just human curation have died or will die.
|
| Good AI curation can bring you the exact content you're
| looking for, can but not will. I've seen it work times and
| times again, but I've also noticed that you have to be
| aware of the flaws of the tool to be able to use them or it
| gets really bad really quick.
|
| You can't let the AI take control, if it derails to content
| you don't like you must know what it uses as a quality
| signal and give it a thumbs down, if it is intentionally
| derailed, you must stop using the platform.
|
| TikTok recently released an update to their algorithm, it
| ruined my FYP and replaced my content with inane videos
| made by people nearby - hyperlocal garbage. The feedback
| mechanisms given no longer work, before that update they
| did.
|
| I do think that even people being nostalgic here about the
| "old internet" should try and learn how to turn AI curation
| for their own advantage instead of just being sad and
| nostalgic.
| rchaud wrote:
| I use third party Reddit apps that largely resemble RSS
| feeds, and pull directly from the API. So you don't see any
| of the new social media features. You don't even see ads!
|
| The same is true for desktop, with with the Reddit
| Enhancement Suite browser extension. My Reddit has looked
| largely the same for nearly 10 years!
| dkarl wrote:
| Some subreddits are decent. Use old reddit and go straight
| to your subreddits so you never see the home page.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Gemini protocol might be something here. But it's probably
| too "techy" to get widespread traction.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| mrunseen wrote:
| I don't know about userbase but old.reddit with disabled
| subreddit CSS is quite usable for me.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| This reminded me of a story that hit the front page a few years
| ago. Even if content sticks around and isn't modified, Google
| will eventually forget it and you won't be able to find it
| without a bookmark.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840
| bobsmooth wrote:
| For anyone that wants to help with this, check out the Archive
| Team Warrior project. You can donate bandwidth and some CPU
| cycles to archiving different parts of the web. There's a VM
| image you can download that makes it really easy.
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
|
| You can choose to help archive reddit, pastebin, URL shorteners
| and other ephemeral parts of the internet
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior_projects
|
| I've also taken to updating the citations in Wikipedia articles
| with archive links.
| shoto_io wrote:
| TL;DR
|
| The second law of thermodynamics applies to the Internet as well.
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