So, since I first made this video the internet has had quite another big instance of the internet and it's data dying. As most of you probably know or have heard recently Reddit is charging a crazy fee for their API, which is pushing out 3rd party apps in a major way, and in response 300 of the top subreddits are blacking out indefinitely and others are expected to follow suit. I know this might not be that crazy to some, but to others it can be seen as we are living through the end of the easily accessible living internet. Discussions that used to take place on public forums, or more recently reddit pages, are now behind locked sources, private discord servers or other hidden away gems. Soon many of the human interactions and posts made by self made experts freely volunteering their information and knowledge will be gone, possibly replaced by language learning AI bots with the façade of false human interaction. I just hope that there is an alternative in the near future.
There's a few things here: 1. you're a youngin. Website hosting has always had an issue of supporting itself Advertising was the go to answer for allowing for a site to pay the bills so to speak. Advertising on the internet is turning out to not be what it was (yet again. See ads were originally sold per number of hits, then per thousand clicks, and now it's typically a roulette wheel combined with an auction site through google or social media) 2. link rot is actually a good thing when it comes to personal data and just the sheer amount of data and junk bloating the internet. In fact, just as there's services trying to preserve the internet, there's also services trying to remove personal data for you, and perhaps these outnumber the preservation sites. 3. the internet is... well, it's losing its shine and it's maturing as a... thing? It's not the highly idealized archive we expected, it's not the digital library of alexandria. It's ephemeral, and we knew that (but did not want to acknowledge it) when wikipedia was being criticized (and new), for how editable (and thus ephemeral) it was. Somehow I also remember Penn and Teller having a set of instructions (either a recipe or something), that were on the internet to demonstrate how fallible and wrong information can be presented.(that may have fallen to the wayside), which, in turn, had somehow be edited and itself became some sort of example of the faults of the internet. This has always been the case. What's scary in a way, has been that the link rot shows the internet shrinking as our concentration of traffic further shrinks us to visiting maybe 5 or six sites for 90% of our traffic. (google, netflix, facebook, twitter, and a few others). Nobody's bothering to make sites for funsies anymore and the concentration is also a concentration of power... But then again, both TV and radio have had similar concentrations of power, more regulations, and the wild days of their youth had fallen to the wayside as they matured. Not sure if it's bad or good...
Seems to me the or one golden age of internet has already passed. Quora and Reddit are awful for sharing/researching information but have killed off the buildalongs and technical websites. Google is really bad for finding anything but things for sale now and most search engines have followed suit. Lot's of information being shared via video, which is ok for some stuff but is really second place when it comes to referencing and folllowing instructions. I feel lucky to have gained from what the internet was, I hope we can resurect the best parts of it.
It's just TotSE collapsing all over again, except TotSE let you say and see ANYTHING, provided it happened to SWIM (Someone Who Isn't Me). Some parts of that place were awful, and others were incredible. Reddit came pretty close to filling that gap though, and so will whatever jumps in to fill that BBS style feed.
Internet monopolies own all the sites which people primarily browse. The age of millions of forums and sites that were each highly active with their own communities, of which you could only discover by chance or by internet rings, is long gone. Once we had social media that allowed us to customize every aspect of the page. Now the most we can do is add photos or maybe tweak colors. The collapse of variety is the true death of the internet.
This right here. People stopped even learning how to build websites, and now with block type editors and templates, it is easy. Definitely no more complex than all the fiddling one has to do to maintain a fb page.
The internet "dying" is a really creepy idea to me. I have lived with the internet my entire life, and just thinking about the stuff that was on the internet when I was born being gone now makes me a little sad.
I do think this is a good thing partially, because I don't think it is sustainable for us to keep every piece of data there is out there forever. Especially things that do not really contribute very much like some random twitter account and are just taking up space. We have to have some way of cleaning up old data while also being able to keep things people do want kept.
@@Popthebop While i do agree that our archival efforts aren't the best, i think that internet has allowed for experiencing the past in a more pure form than we could in the past. You can if you archived it, experience what you did in the past in exactly the same way. Because data doesn't degrade, i started up my computer that i haven't touched since like 6 years ago, and it was exactly as i left it. I can in 2 seconds see all my digital drawings of 10 years, all my writing and all my childhood games. I can too in 2 seconds see all the videos i downloaded, some that aren't even online anymore. And the nice thing is, that 10 years ago computers still had x86 architecture and 16x9 displays, so i can display it perfectly as i remember, with my new monitor and computer. I just said that data doesn't degrade, that isn't fully true, it can die. But data isn't unique and you can just copy it. So when my computers die i can just find a similar device and just copy the whole os 1 to 1 and its like nothing has changed. Us experiencing most our memories digitally has one upside and that is that it is easy to archive. Unlike carefully preserving a physical object or maximizing the quality in which you can digitize analog data like with VHS tapes or old television series. Also while you considered it a downside, it really isn't. Strangers around the world having the same memory of yours is great, that means that if you are lucky and reach a big enough audience you can probably find someone who experienced the same thing as you. Which i feel isn't always possible if everyone who has experienced something is localized in one small place. Archiving is seriously lacking though, because companies simply just don't care AT ALL. Not even when it benefits them financially. Game companies regularly haven't preserved THEIR OWN GAMES. Browsers and Adobe will without hesitation dump a decade of flash content down the drain without even thinking about archiving it. So randos with no experience have to archive everything out of the goodness of their hearts. This and the increasing size of software and media is a recipe for disaster. I'm sure when a petabyte is a normal consumer size for a storage device, games will be 100 TB just because they can.
@@InterDylan honestly true that! I think I’ve said all I have, but it’s been wonderful conversing! Grand wishes for your career and life dude! Hope you have a wonderful day! :O
I love that people told us "be careful what you put on the internet because the internet is forever" and now that I'm older I'm just like... we were all sooooo naive.
@@Shifter-1040ST I still remember when Google used to show websites and not a bunch of retarded news articles. We need to ditch the search engines and go back to the databases
The worst thing about the profiles of dead Facebook users is that some people have nobody who can put their profile into memorial mode, either because they have no friends or loved ones they trust to do so, they didn't know it was an option, or the person trusted to do that for them doesn't know how to do it. My best friend Lily died in 2019, and I still see Facebook mentioning her every so often because her mom either doesn't know how to put it in memorial mode, or doesn't care. I think the latter, because even with Lily's boyfriend asking her about it, it hasn't been done and she hasn't given him permission to do it himself. So I have to get occasional painful reminders of her death because her mom either can't or won't put Lily's account in Memorial Mode.
My original Facebook I lost my email so now it will be up forever. I have tried to get it back for years and finally gave up after I quit using Facebook. It will be up forever even if I die
@@vau_st but that's the point of memorial mode, you may be right, but it's wrong, she's holding on to someone who is gone, don't forget them but don't keep them tied to the earth when their gone. Give them the memorial and let them pass on
@@jarate8076 I kind of agree with you on an immediate reaction point of view, but really using social media accounts as memorials to the dead are a great next step to what we already do physically. The only problem is, is that they belong to private companies who at any moment can change what they do with it for any reason, or even if they promise no to, could get a new owner who doesn't care about the past and fucks everything up (like Elon with Twitter) What is needed is a nonprofit, public online memorial service for the sake of archivists and future historians that will be link rot and dead internet proof
I’ve experienced this myself. Little corners of the internet, lonely nooks, isolated spots only a few hundred people have ever viewed (and even less have remembered). I’ve made friends, witnessed history, had unimaginable fun. And now it’s all gone. One day I return to that little hidey hole and find the entrance has been sealed up, as if it were never there, and everyone’s moved on and forgotten. I miss them sometimes.
I'm surprised "link rot" isn't a more widespread term considering how common the issue is. Another great video glad to see you're continuing with this type of content!
That's because they're trying to keep all of this under wraps. Why else do you think they would be eliminating vast swaths of internet history with no one noticing, and with it, the first quarter of the 21st century?
Well that's because rarely anyone cares about it. MOST of the people that are using the internet browse through one or the other social media platform and use nearly exclusively "internal" content at best having a few inter-site links that lead to other big social media platforms, and as a matter of fact those links rarely decay if ever at all. Not to mention barely anyone(in absolute numbers) looks up the "old data" that is not on one of the "big websites" on any semblance of regular basis, so at best you average user may just very ocassionaly encounter link rot. Also do keep in mind that MOST of the rotten links come from small **personal** websites or blogs, that just pop in and out of existence, like faulty christmass lights, and rarely anyone cares to keep the url convention consistent(i mean even some companies like hp don't care for that, so what do you expect from any random person) or edit the old articles to adress the changes. This also puts into perspective just how much we rely on FTANG in our daily internet activities, and it's actually very frightening.
Link rot is a serious issue on Wikipedia, actually. I made a thesis about this enciclopedia, and I had to use Wayback Machine (a website that stores old versions of other websites) to check almost half of the resources I needed (academic articles, newspaper articles, videos, photos, forums...). Popular and important articles relied on fonts that dated years, and in some cases weren't even up anymore. Well, while I'm glad Wikipedia can keep up with all the information it has for years and years, I'm concerned about all the information we lose every day. Two years later, I always find myself going to Wayback Machine when working on a project, and it is very annoying.
I see how there are so many countries that really only have a page and almost all of the sources are lost. I was looking for flags of a random african nation for my Iron Assault map, (a roblox game) and there was NOTHING. No flags, no description. It was a dead link in the most horrifying way possible. It shows up as a name, but its redded out. There was zero info on the country besides a quick description in the main page of the modern nation.
I think this phenomenon is better described this as "the internet is forgetting" instead of "the internet is dying". For the internet to be dying, the volume of new content and user access needs to be less than the rate of information being lost (on average, obviously). Basically, if the internet is in a prolonged state where it "forgets" more than it "learns", then it's dying. To say it's dying when it's merely forgetting (which itself is a problem, don't get me wrong), conjures images of that one South Park episode where the global internet goes down.
I think you have a good point. Forgetting sounds like a better term for this topic. Especially if there might be some cyclical internet trends that might've already occurred a while ago...not sure I can think of some good examples to support this. But I'm pretty sure there might be.
Link Rot is something I know way too well as a Sims CC hunter. SO many shut down websites, 404 errors, and blogs being wiped out of existance. Another thing is ao3. I hope it never gets taken down. It has archived fan content from so many years past it is a vital piece of so many communities.
A03 is my little haven when it comes to fanfiction about lesser-knowm series or minor characters/ships, especially a Light Novel series called Ascendance of a bookworm. I've read so many stories on A03, enjoyed it so much, if it ever deleted it's old catalog and 'forgot' itself, I would be emotionally devastated over losing a large part of the stories that touched my life. I've read on A03 since the early 2010's in my childhood, so it 'forgeting' would be the same as my childhood local park getting demolished and replaced with a golf course for rich adults only.
@@zealmilenio177 me too!! I haven’t been reading as long as you, but I don’t know what I’d do for fan content without ao3. 450 bookmarks later and it’s still my go-to for fanfic. Older communities also thrive there! I found a Trigun fic from 2001 that is *still* getting traction! This site is so important to so many people, it’s a piece of internet history.
It's probably because they knew they were going to introduce AI so they had to clean it up to give it good sources of information and make it quicker to search through.
There was a website that I posted poems and short stories on as a teen, made for students. You could also ask questions, whether simple or heavy, and forums for talk. As well as a space to post general questions to other students. Last I checked, it was gone. There were some stories that I know I didn't save anywhere else. May have to see if somewhere it was memorialized but, considering I don't remember the username, seems impossible to find.
Yeah there’s been a lot of things I wish I could see again too. When I was a bit younger I’d just save things using tools available within websites or apps. I learned the hard way that most of those aren’t permanent. I didn’t realize for a while that there’s a relatively low cap on the number of Reddit pages you can save, that saving a UA-cam video to a playlist doesn’t prevent it from getting taken down, and that saving a message in Snapchat doesn’t make it impossible to delete. All that media feels like it was a part of me once. Almost like actual memories, just more clear than real ones. Speaking of which, there’s one video on UA-cam in particular that I was wondering if anyone has or knows where to find it. It was a short minute long video of some dramatic/inspiring music over colorized footage of German and American paratroopers (I think it was 90% German though) in the second word war. I had originally stumbled across it after watching the original Fallschirmjager remix music video thing. Of course UA-cam took them both down because they like to erase anything related to the half of history they don’t like but some people, like myself, save stuff like that before it gets taken down. I’m more than willing to help others hunt for what they’ve lost too. Just reply to my comment and I’ll see what I can do. Best of luck.
@@jlight7346 I'd love to help, even if I'm unsure if I'll actually be able to. I've mostly been looking for old (Mostly Kinder) commercials (one even to this day), but I don't mind hunting for other stuff either. So uh... Count me in?
Here's my two cents: Cent 1: You shouldn't rely on the internet archive. It's an awesome resource and incredibly helpful, but it has way too many issues and blind spots to be the only place to depend on (this applies to all similar big projects, not just IA specifically). If you truly care about something you have to save a local copy for yourself. Cent 2: Archival should be proactive, you should already save (and if appropriate submit to IA) everything you care about because you never know when something will disappear and whether anyone else cared to save it. It often isn't that difficult to do either, eg with yt-dlp or its GUI frontends you can usually just put in a link to your favorite youtube playlist or something and download it all with a press of a button - it's at the very least a lot easier than trying to track down a copy of that one missing song in your music playlist years later. I know the amount of content disappearing is a statistic most people don't have a grasp of, but I do UA-cam archival and I literally see thousands of videos disappearing every single month, most of them not in the IA, and that's a statistic based on just the videos in my own archive alone.
I have this BIG playlist of animatics, animations, and mixed media. And the stuff I put in like 2 years ago, or even a month ago it keeps getting deleted. So I second this
@@Popthebop Sometimes I get into a type of media that was popular years ago (right now unfortunately being Homestuck) and it feels so depressing trying to find videos from the time it was popular only to be met with a blank screen or unavailable video. Sometimes I try to find videos or websites I loved to visit when I was little only to be met with disappointment. It’s even worse on websites like tiktok where people seem to delete their videos not even a year after posting them, just because they’ve moved on from that interest
I've been building websites for 20 years, and have one that has lasted that long, and I see what you mean. Part of what happened was the advent of php and database driven blogs replacing static pages. A few years ago though, some of us learned the hard way that this was a kind of bad trade. We did so much work to make our sites more interactive and improve our SEO only for the search engines to change and stop truly promoting the most informative and accurate content, them and social media use algorithms to promote ads and people who paid them or paid them more, and finally being forced to compete with both that and clickbait and malicious sites. It all became too much of a headache to be invisible to everyone except our niche communities anyway, so there was no point in fighting for place in a system that was going to ignore us when it could and obscure us when it couldn't. So most of us have a static HTML version of our sites again, and many are exploring Gemini and other alternative coding for static pages. As long as someone pays our hosting (most of us make arrangements for family to do so) they'll be there. What is killing a lot of sites lately is the expectation of visibility. They get on the internet to be seen outside of their circles and there's this hope of "going viral". Once they see there is no hope for most people, they either mature into understanding this is a means of communication and focus on those who actually do want to see or hear them, or they give up and don't bother finding other ways of using the internet. So yeah the internet is dying as we know it, but what will result is something like networks. This is why I'm enjoying the Fediverse. It's kind of there already.
@@chemplay866 It's an area of the internet wherein people communicate with each other and share stuff without a billionaire middleman controlling what you do and don't get to post or see. You or your community do your own regulation.
The archives are slowly disappearing When the archives disappear it becomes harder to find past information it might become permanently lost if not archived again Companies and other organizations might want to control or destroy archives for their own interests It happens quietly most of the time without people noticing The internet is centralizing at accelerating rates
are there any web portals that go-to old school blogs or forum pages? what fediverse apps can i use to self-regulate my own internet communications with people? i really want to reduce dependence on this stupid website, youtube.
@motherchuckair404 There are various services you can use, but they all lack features and functionalities we've come to expect or find to be intrinsic nowadays. Federated alternatives tend to suffer from a lack of low-quality content, little user engagement, and a lack of apparent need; all of which can halt or hinder development and growth. Nonetheless, you can find them if you want, or even create your own. I'm on my phone right now, so I can't link to anything because of the inherent difficulty. Sorry.
I think you mistake the popularity with longevity. Even frickin UA-cam is in real danger of losing their monopoly. It's all a cycle of life and death, and some "immortalization". (Nukes can kill us all and wipe everything out) Nothing is truly immortal. Memories fade just as new cases arise.
The Internet Archive/The Way Back Machine really just take snapshots, you might find a page you liked on it and all the links aren't archived. For instance, the page of recipes from Soup Plantation had tons of recipes and of them only 2 are archived.
sometimes it does, ive even found old mods for obscure old games from 2006 i thought were gone forever cos they are hosted/archived download links somehow on the wayback machine
I've run into this exact same issue, and it extends to capturing images. The older the page, the more likely there's nothing left but text and a barebones framework of empty spots where pictures used to be. I understand that images are expensive to host, but it's immensely frustrating.
Then thing is you should archive them yourself I did that aswell, with a extremely rare song sang by Dame Vera Lynn in 1935, only 100 copies were issued, of almost all have been lost. There is not much data available of it, but I archived it and downloaded it, to be safe, to safe history and the amazing talent of the Orchestra and singer.
The entire concept of taking a snapshot doesn't really sound very smart to me. Snapshot is heavy probably a few MB long. Compare the actual text is actually just a few bites long. People should have a type the text and not the snapshots. Less space per piece means more pieces can be stored
And imagine... before the internet, all this kind of stuff was lost from the start. Not everything can or needs to be preserved, but put in the effort to preserve the stuff that is truly important.
There's so, ever so much of the 90s Internet that has been lost forever. So much that I stumbled on since 1993 that I'd never be able to find again. One thing I learned is that if you find something online that you want to keep for yourself, you don't just save the link to it. You download it. I've c/p'd so much text and grabbed so many image and sound files and PDFs now. And if you're really serious about it then you have that all backed up on other drives and other media.
i've looked at some old pages that are still there and they aren't really useful anymore and the internet had only sort of began then with but people couldn't connect or get it to work. Back then websites were only a bit useful but it was difficult to search through it all and it was slow. It was just a lot of playing around with it then to see what could be done with it with a few sites for games and some forums and chat rooms. But other than that it still wasn't that useful since most people didn't have internet back then most areas didn't allow you to connect despite offering it for a few pounds or dollars. It wasn't until 2003 that we started to have fast computers and internet connections.
I hear so many people talk about the future "singularity" as if all the data on the internet could create the perfect artificial intelligence if it were only just all coalesced together and analyzed right, with the right algorithmic trickery or whatever technological wizardry. Like the internet will ascend to some higher being basically a technological god. But what if it "hit it's limit" indeed. I feel like if we reach a critical mass of stuff out there, especially of complete bullshit, the internet and all these new AI that are being developed... will just collapse into a miasma of complete garbage information that means nothing. Old content gets deleted or forgotten or drowned out in a soup of self destructing infinitely generated bullshit. That might be the future of the internet if we aren't careful. Who knows.
I wish. Carrington! Carrington! CARRIINGTON!! No that would cause so much death and destruction, but if it happened I would still have to smile for a second before I think about the downsides
that's like claiming libraries will one day "hit their limit" and we'll suddenly have to just burn all the books. The internet will churn through content, and i doubt that people will be able to read "this" in 500 years, but the idea that it will need a hard reset makes no sense
It'll keep going on. Its just that things today will be buried under digital rot after a couple decades. It'll still be useful, just old things will be harder to get access to.
To me, "the internet is dying" means something else. While in the beginning there were so many interesting things like websites, blogs, forums, etc. created and/or run by real people, genuine enthusiasts of some specific thing, now everything is just ads and "content" created by companies. It often looks genuine, but it's just clever advertising. Even many people's profiles on social media or dating apps are often bots. While before everything was real and internet meant real connection, now most things are fake, only meant to harvest your data or convince you to buy something. Everything's synthetic, content is generated instead of created, and you're talking to bots instead of people. THIS is what really shows that internet is dying. Fck that.
It's strange to think of just how recent the internet is. Nowadays I feel like it's always been there, and it's hard to remember the days when I didn't have internet access everywhere I go through a smartphone, even though I'm 30 and witnessed the evolution of it. The blogs I created between the ages of 12 and 17, the Harry Potter website I had at the time, the forums I was a part of, and so many websites I used to visit daily are all gone. This video pointed out many things I hadn't thought of before. Great work again! I'm glad you're enjoying making them. Hope you keep it up!
You're about to relive it with AI, although currently we only have language prediction models, they aren't sentient the way a cat is. They just compute the next word for a topic. But generalized AI and the use of AI of all kinds is shifting everything and it started with algorithms for attention.
This has been bothering me more and more over the past couple of years. It's like a midlife crisis, but I'm barely into my adult life. The internet is so ethereal. There is so much information I've found that I want to keep forever, like artwork, videos, stories, and articles, that could disappear at any moment. I download a lot of things I want to keep, but even those copies will eventually fade with bit rot. All of those memories and unique pieces will disappear, and then what will those years of my life be worth? So, I'm trying to make a change. I'm creating my art on paper, canvas, and wood instead of digitally. If I draw digitally, I'll print the results on archival paper. I'm trying to get back into reading physical books and going outside to experience the real world. Nothing lasts forever, but at least those can't be deleted at any moment.
Physical art is great, but for videos and digital art have you considered saving them on an external hard drive? You'd need to back that up and transfer it every few years, but a terabyte of storage isn't that expensive. Would be a good way to preserve the stuff that doesn't archive well in a physical state or that you don't have room for.
@@moseyonover733 Yes, I have a couple of external hard drives, but I'm terrible at keeping them up-to-date. I definitely need to make regular backups part of my routine. Another problem is that I have tens of thousands of files that need to be combed through, many of which are duplicates, no longer needed, or part of a long series of copies of one project with slight differences between each step. Thank you for the suggestion! I've been meaning to do this for years, so I will make myself start today. Probably...
@@Tyneras You can do these things already, just one step at a time. For converting media, write a batch script with FFmpeg. For tagging and naming, ExifTool. For duplicates, dupeGuru. Even the gifs can be slowed down with FFmpeg.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal". All physical things will decay inevitably. Not saying you shouldn't archive all that stuff, it's a wise thing to do. And I feel you about getting physical books. Even if its more expensive and vulnerable to fires and such, I trust them way more than the internet and flashdrives these days. But remembering there's something else after this life makes me way less anxious about it all
I feel like I shouldn't get so upset about the internet changing and things getting deleted but I just can't help it. So much of our history, our discussions, _who we were_ throughout different eras just being GONE is genuinely upsetting. Humans of old had stone tablets, tapestries, books, etc to record their history and daily lives, but our lives are online and vulnerable to erasure. We are entirely reliant on the internet and it could be gone at any moment. Case in point- in 2015 I logged in to my old myspace account fully expecting a blast of nostalgia. The last time I had been active on there was around 2009, so I was really excited to reread my old blog posts and messages and download all my old pictures. But the whole site was completely unrecognizable and almost all of my content was missing. All messages gone. All blog posts gone. All but maybe 10 pictures gone. I'm not ashamed to say that I actually cried. My entire online life from age 22-28 was gone. I later found out that myspace hadn't been practicing good backup hygiene and something like 90% of user data got lost during a server migration shortly before I had logged back on. If I had logged in only a few months earlier I could have saved everything. I won't lie, I'm still not over that lol. I had a similar experience trying to log back in to Beliefnet, anyone else remember Bnet? It was a huge discussion site for religion, spirituality, and all sorts of random topics and I was on there every day in the very early 2000s chatting with people. I tried to get back on there a while ago hoping to find my old posts, but all the discussion forums were gone. The whole site is just a small selection of articles now. Thousands of messages from real humans from cultures all over the world, erased forever. I'm autistic so I'm probably getting overly emotional about this, but the thought of huge chunks of human history just disappearing scares the shit out of me. It hurts my heart. I'm going to start keeping a paper journal again, but there really needs to be some sort of widely applicable solution for this problem.
Most stone tablets made for whatever reasons are also probably completely destroyed or unreadable, maybe because of intentional destruction, maybe someone wanted to write something else, maybe they got into the ocean and can't be found, maybe buried so deep that you can't realistically find them there. Nothing is forever, but hey we even have fossils of the beginnings of life, so future civilizations will be exactly like us needing to reconstruct history from some partial information from different sources
I think the unfortunate truth is that to some extent there is simply too much information for anyone to care enough to hold on to. A lot (but definitely not all) of the writings that have survived the test of time have been things that are more significant beyond a sentimental value. Not saying people shouldn't put more effort into archiving these things given that for the first time in history we have a very easy way of doing so (and I encourage you to do so if you have the time and will), but at some point its hard to justify archiving hundreds of gigabytes of forum posts that nobody is going to reread.
The prospect for Facebook could actually be worse than becoming mostly dead people's accounts by 2060. Meta could shut the whole thing down well before then if it becomes unprofitable or they want to push everybody to a more modern platform. If this happens, they'll likely try to do right by their users by offering a time-limited opportunity to download all their posts, but many people won't bother to do this and their content could be relegated to an offline backup stored in a warehouse somewhere and become lost to time.
I downloaded all my photos then deleted Facebook. Then I reinstalled windows to get rid of some malware. After I realized my photos were gone, but was comforted because no other generation in human history was shackled by that many photographs.
Facebook is entirely unsafe it was one of two i left first you need to clean your temporary data every day so your account doesn't get hacked into which it will within 48 hours because they leave open back doors for them, if you have apps enabled they can hide an app on that will keep hacking in. I started being spied upon on there and my privacy being stepped on and then i had a weird incident happen right before the analytica scandal went public where i saw the dude with ginger hair appear in the online list on the side, and then somehow somebody was able to send me a dm to try and get me to sign up to a different social media despite my settings being set to private and friends only. I have no idea what was happening but it got weirder and then it settled down a bit after i got a new facebook but i still felt i was being watched so i finally got rid of it. Then i got rid of twitter because it just turned really mean and elon turned the feed into a lot of very reactive posts, so i doubt these social media sites have anything important on them most of it is just junk and memes no real interesting discussions had mostly selfies or pictures of their food lol not going to be useful or interesting to future generations.
People have been discussing how the internet archive may be taken down due a a lawsuit it's currently battling that it seems very likely to lose. Though it may only be speculation that it'd be taken down if it lost, it's still obviously a possibility, so that'd be a lot of internet history, and just general history taken away.
Unlikely. The lawsuit specifically covers IA's ebook loan program. Unless the consortium of publishers decides to be really vindictive with the costs, the wayback machine part will be unaffected. There's no reason for the publishers to do that, given how it would tarnish their own reputations.
@@vylbird8014that doesn't "tarnish their reputation", sadly most of the world wouldn't even notice. But I think there's a significant number of people who have so many good reasons for supporting the IA and also Wikipedia, which has a shit load of money lying around for a site financed by donations, relies on the IA so I think they would help as well.
This just goes to show that the internet as such is an organism that made up of many cells. It constantly evolves. Cells die, new ones emerge. Like any form of life. It's not sad, it's actually beautiful.
It's not a terrible analogy, it's not a great one. Cells are replaceable and differ from their neighbors in mostly irrelevant ways, old websites lost to time were unique in very profound ways. In many tissues, cells must die and be replaced for the tissue itself to remain healthy. But not in all tissues. And more importantly, there's no real reason why websites should die and be replaced like these cells would, most old websites were just a few kilobytes of text data in size and could still be hosted or archived with no harm done to the rest of the internet.
Do you look at a plague where a parasite is thriving at the expense of an entire species going extinct and say retarded shit like "this is so beautiful"?
I think of it more like a biosphere/ With different ecosystems. Different countries even have their own Internet speeds and servers .. So stuff doesn't always connect perfectly, especially in countries with oppressive governments.
I thought you were more popular, just noticed the numbers. I'm 100% your channel will blow up like a popsicle stand. You're good at finding interesting things, and explaining them. I hope internet fame won't suck
The internet has been dying since UA-cam got ads. Nothing online is permanent. I got tired of songs and things i liked disappearing so i started buying physical copies. Y'all can be online n cry about things getting taken down.... I'll be at home with by books, dvds, cds, and traditional art. I think money really ruined the internet. It really was a fun free thing before. Remember when AMV's weren't taken down for copyright strikes? Because they were made by teens just makin vent art. I miss those days. Nobody was claiming they made the anime or songs and nobody attacked them.
I can join you in nostalgia for the early days. It was not a 'serious' place back then. The stakes were low because the internet was just a hangout for nerdy engineering students and tech enthusiasts. People hacked websites for fun all the time, and it was always funny when some company homepage got defaced - law enforcement seldom cared. No one used their real name, ever, because what happened online was expected to stay online. It was a parallel world, existing beside the real one but barely interacting with it.
This honestly saddens me. I regularly preserve old media whenever I come across it and a part of my process is finding any and all journals, blog updates, dev notes, etc. from said media on their old legacy websites. I've luckily found a handful, but some are gone forever. There's no cache, no "Internet Time-Machine" time-stamp, or any archive. And to top it off, as you mentioned at the beginning of your video, there's decay (or as I call it dilapidation. Like a building rotting).
Very glad you brought up the occurrence of account owners dying before they give any thought to their digital presence after they pass. I remember looking up an actress I saw in a great film a while back, and it turns out she died roughly a year and a half prior; her Instagram and Twitter accounts were simply hanging in the balance, as if she was on hiatus from social media and would be back at some point later on. I wonder if social media accounts will be acknowledged in wills soon, especially for accounts belonging to larger creators, seeing as those profiles may be capable of generating substantial amounts of ad revenue which could support family and loved ones post-mortem.
It's fascinating how the death of information online mirrors the historical erasure of knowledge, from works being lost and leaving behind just citations and fragments (how articles and websites are citing sources that are no longer available) to the efforts of keeping said knowledge alive through archives and restoration.
There is already so much out there we can't know, or have no idea about. Or even if we do, that we just know they existed and nothing more. Really makes you think
Civilizations leave lots of other evidence of their existence behind, other than written records, and not all civilizations had written records. However there actually are many books and such that we know existed, but are now lost, which is a shame. It’s quite an interesting topic, too. There’s also things like the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui, which no one alive can read anymore.
The Entire Internet is experiencing possibly the whole existence of the Universe in just a few decades. From the big bang, to the current solar system, to the Red Giant, and then to the Heat Death of the Universe.
It gets worse when you learn the only reason he’s changing the policy is because he wants to spite NPR. Elon deliberately mislabeled NPR as “state funded media” despite NPR explaining him multiple times privately that it’s not true. As a result NPR made a statement that they were leaving the platform permanently. Elon then publicly threatened them, saying he would take away their @ if they left and give it to someone else. Then he released that post about removing inactive accounts. Yes. He is that petty
We gotta stop letting narcissists be billionaires Owning a billion dollars should require mental screening or something It's more dangerous than owning a gun It's more dangerous than owning a icbm probably A billion dollars spent the right way can change the course of history so it should either be regulated to where no individual can have that much wealth or that you need special regular mental checkups and screenings and whatnot
I encountered this recently with Yahoo mail. I had a mail account that had existed since about 2003, when I was 9 years old. I rarely used it anymore as I went into the 2010s, since I'd switched to Gmail like most people, but it was a nice archive of my childhood. I had emails from long lost friends, encouraging emails I had written to myself using a website that sent emails "into the future", old pictures and videos, and also login info for a plethora of older sites. I would occasionally log back in every year or so, either to reminisce or reset passwords for old sites. Well, in 2020 Yahoo suddenly decided to change their data policy. If you didn't log in to your email for _one year_ your entire inbox would be wiped and deleted. Not archived or hidden or anything recoverable, just straight up, irrecoverably gone. So, there went a good portion of memories from my childhood. I'm a very sentimental person, and generally do a lot to archive my digital memories, but there's only so much you can do with how chaotic the internet is. My best advice is: if you want to remember something digital, keep it on a physical analog storage like a CD or hard drive; even USBs and SSDs aren't completely safe as they can degrade over time, essentially giving them a shelf life (ideally they can store data indefinitely, but only if you plug them in every few years or so).
Oh thanks for this! I better turn on my ssd i have. I had saved tons of photos of visual novel. That game got eos’d twice! 😢 still never read the other routes. My fave route is perserved.
So informative! I had no idea about any of this so thanks for condensing this topic into an easy + interesting format for me to digest. This makes the fight to keep internet archive websites up way more important :( sad to think just how much we’d lose without Internet Archive
It's really sad to see our digital heritage dying over time. I've been saving everything I like and making backups on different drives in different locations to not lose essentially my childhood, the things which made me who I am.
internet sites dying/lost feels incredibly Better sweet. I have things i and friends made that are now lost media(either for technical failure or a website getting shut down) and while it kinda sucks they are gone, knowing they are fighnight make them feel more important to appreciate them while they are still here. beautiful video mate, great work. Also fuck elon, 30 days?!? ik people's private/backup accounts that don't get touched for more than that holy shit
Just wanted to leave a comment to thank you for making this channel and these videos. No matter how much the old internet may be degrading, it feels great to see new channels like yours pop up and continue where others leave off. Your content is great and I can't wait to be here when your channel grows enough to be considered "mainstream", because it will. Good luck with everything!
I deeply regret deleting my childhood youtube channel. From ages 8-13 I was uploading videos almost every day of my life. I deleted the entire channel at 13 or 14 because I was transitioning and didn't want videos of my old self up at the time, but as an adult I think about the fact I could've had this expansive documentation of my life as a kid to look back on. I was always taught to treasure the past and my memories growing up through things like my grandparents old video cameras, so I'd love more than anything to get that channel back. I've tried with youtube's support many times but it seems like once you delete a channel that wasn't archived, it's near impossible to retrieve. Of course if anyone reading this knows anything about deleted channels and if it is in any way possible to retrieve them I'd love to hear any suggestions, but right now it seems like all of it is gone for good.
Ive had a simular case happen for me as well, ever since I was 5 years old I would always make videos with this app called E-CAM im sure, it was an old recording app from 2000s that was most likely forgotten but every single day I would record myself doing something with my siblings, playing a game, playing with filters or some random wierd thing No exaggeration I had hundreds of videos on it and they were all saved in my very old laptop. It had memories of when I lived in my old house and everything I did back then, but when I was 10-11 years old, the laptop slowly stopped working as well as before, and we decided to throw it away forever I never thought it years ago when we threw it away, but almost everyday now I realize that we threw away what was probably more than 1,000 of recorded memories from my childhood. I never uploaded the videos anywhere so I cant watch them again either. I really miss the videos, I wish I could rewatch them now that im older, but it taught me a lesson which is to always appreciate what you have before its gone. (and to archive your stuff)
I’m glad I saved everything I could from childhood. Still lots of things got thrown or given away by my mom cleaning up the house. Most of the toys and stuff I kept are worth a lot of money now. I had a Homie Hopper RC car I bought for $25 and sold it for $250 on EBay. I wish I had a video camera when I was a kid. I want to remember what I was like and hear my kid voice. I also had a laptop from my middle school years filled with pictures and the hard drive failed. I never threw it out so I could get it repaired, it would just be expensive.
I'm delighted that you made a video on the dead internet that isn't about the Bot invasion but the actual decay process. It's almost organic, isn't it?
Been around online since early 2000s so i've had to get used to this for a while. Almost all the early stuff is long gone and mostly not on the internet archive in any meaningful way. Trying to save everything i find valuable is simply impossible, it would take so long and use terabytes of data. I think we need to do more to have some kind of tracability and ability to preserve before things disappear, but also sometimes you have to accept that what we care about can and will disappear in the blink of an eye.
I always find it funny when they put links from the internet in a book as a references. First, they are gone in a couple of years; second, it is redicilous to type long links.
Yea i got a lot of books from 1995 to 2005 with that and all the links are long dead. i am surprised how early they started doing this a lot of people didn't have internet yet in the late 90s. also remember when theyvstarted putting cd roms in books the cd's would only work on windows 9x.
Of course, the real reason why the internet is "dying" is that the handful of conglomerates that provide access to it have reached the level of control where they are able to systematically delete everything that isn't paid-for corporate advertising (even if it poses as "user-made content"). And they are doing this.
Thanks for talking about the whole link rot thing. sometimes I have saved links and tweets to things that I want to go back to after writing my thoughts about thing I saw there. And just want to look more into the topic later. But sometimes it ends up no longer being there in the link I saved. Most of the time I can go back and see it in wayback, but sometimes it ends up not being there. Or it ends up getting scrubbed from a place like UA-cam due to a copyright claim despite being there for years because the larger company overall wants to drive traffic to their new streaming service add-on and doesn't want as much attention put on those full episodes uploaded by fans or the clips. I thought this kind of stinks, especially if someone didn't want to watch the full episode or have the streaming service for the full series, and just wanted to watch a particular point or clip and wanted to share it with somebody. :(
damn, I'm not a nostalgic guy. But I truly miss being able to know a lot of websites for specific purposes. One for music, one for games, a forum for an anime I was watching, another forum about the band I like. Now everything is a sub-reddit or a facebook group page. It feels a bit odd.
Having been a massive weeb in the mid 2000s, I can definitely say I get link rot. I have so many memories of fansites that I absolutely loved that are now… gone. Beautiful sites with so much effort and it’s all just dead with geocities, angelfire, and yahoo groups. Of course I imagine a lot of those sites may have been run without reasonable ways to fund its existence not to mention the fact that these fans more than likely grew out of the fandoms. Mostly I just miss the customization of classic internet. Every website looks the same now :(
As an early 80s kid, I saw this when it began to happen. When social media blew up, the personal, quirky websites died as well... I actually really miss the days when people just started a crappy website to describe themselves, their art, commentary and pretty much anything. These websites would probably just *scream* "cRiNgE!!!!!11" to the younger people, but it was actually surprisingly easy to find like-minded individuals due to - links, for one - and most of all the amazing "Guestbooks". It felt more sincere and intimate, especially since almost everyone shared their e-mail adresses. This "clean" and uniform internet that I see today is barely a resemblence to what I grew up with, and I genuinly miss it to a pretty high extent. Excellent videos, by the way 🙌
I do a lot of amateur research on traditional Chinese folk culture and martial arts. I have watched so many sources of obscure historical information disappear over the years. There was a time when local governments such as county government in China all made their own web pages. At the time they all tried to feature the history and culture of their county on their pages in order to attract tourism. Many of these pages featured articles written by local folk historians on niche aspects of history and folk culture. There were countless articles on obscure styles of martial arts, dance, cooking, local gods, festivals, myths etc. Often these were ancient traditions only retained in a single village. These weren't academic articles. Many were written by local academics but not published in academic journals and many by regular people who had dedicated their lives to documenting dying local traditions and history. Many of these people who wrote these articles are now dead and the articles are available nowhere but on these local government sites. Not only that but in many many cases they were the only source of information on these traditions anywhere online. Unfortunately in the last decade almost all of these articles have been pulled from local government sites.
This is a truly heartbreaking and extremely sad video to watch, and for me personally it's especially relatable. I had stupid habits one or two years ago where I'd take an extremely random video or a photo or a voice recording of _absolutely anything_ that could've been taken, and that habit still partially lives on in me to this day, fortunately to a far lesser extent. It was all my subconscious fear of random good moments of life being lost and never recreated again which I desperately wanted to cling onto, not realizing that not *ABSOLUTELY* everything is worth saving, like mundane everyday stuff. And seeing that the same is happening to internet, and *way more important* stuff are being lost, is indeed very saddening to me as a sort of an information freak myself. Also that last line about cringe was straight inspiring.
Another fascinating video essay well told. It's something we all kinda know as we spend more and more time in apps and platforms. It's not the internet that's dying. It's the web.. Which is sad, because the anarchic decentralized nature of the early internet was where anything could happen and we could put our own unique fingerprints on what did
Man, I feel this. There are lots of old Minecraft videos that I used to watch on UA-cam back in 2012 which are just... gone now. I still vividly remember the first Minecraft let's play that I followed (well, for a few episodes at least). I've spent tens of hours looking for it. Sometimes I feel like I have a trick that will help me track it down once again, but it never works. I think its just gone now, like so much from that era. So much content from UA-cam gets wiped, its really quite sad that the glory days of the website aren't even really around anymore.
I miss the golden age of the internet. No corperate agenda, basically nobody was a bot. Nothing was cencored or blocked from being searchable. It was extremely common to make a lifelong friend on a fandom website. Memes were just becoming a thing. I miss the internet i grew up with. We need to all heard together to bring it back
Had this pop up, and I had to watch. This is such an interesting concept to thing about with how the internet is slowly dying. I'm 28, and the first memories of me personally using the internet are around 2004/2005 on forums for some video games I was into at the time (the Sims franchise was a big one), but I remember my mom using the internet on some freecycle sites a few years prior along with eBay. The change of the entire internet is insane, and trying to find some old sites and forum posts is harder to come by. Even with what you said about deceased people on FB, I know that I personally have at least 4 people (that I'm aware of) who have passed away.
well, Gordon. It’s not “dying” per say? It’s that archival efforts are REALLY REALLY hard when it comes to something as big as the internet, and when someone dies or a website dies. Usually no one archives anything on these older websites, which leads to SO MUCH lost media. It’s like gotten to the point pseudo anthropologists have to pick up the slack, because I doubt any actual anthropology people have gotten the memo yet. And like it’s an actual mess, if you weren’t there in the 1990s? woof trying to find any old flash animations, small forums that haven’t been used since 1997, and other stuff. Is almost impossible, genuinely almost impossible. It’s really really hard and expansive job, and sometimes the websites are straight up deleted. And not even the wayback machine can help, so then you have to ask around for anyone or anything that survived the deletion. And like that’s a whole job in of itself, it’s a completely new form of anthropology that’s so varied and expanding that I genuinely think some of the stuff people grew up with is completely lost, gone, defunct, extinct. Like and the only things that remain are the memories of the people who used them last. It’s this big problem, and when I mean big. I mean 100s of millions of websites and posts just gone, but I guess that’s just how it’s been for like 10+ years? Which isn’t helpful in anyway, but it’s something I guess. I have a quote “TikTok, and honestly, most social media, have the same problem and exarcerbate. And I'm not even getting about how kids now have toys and clothing with the logo of TikTok, or Among Us or Fortnite... things that they don't even understand. They will form part of their memories later, and they'll wonder why, and their parents won't have a clear answer either. When you were a kid and had Mickey Mouse stuff at least you could tell "well, that's a cartoon". Mickey Mouse has a meaning. TikTok will vanish in a few years. What sense would it make then? None of these kids will have shared memories. None of those kids would have consumed things that had context. And because the nature of that cheap entertainment is by itself ephemeral, they won't ever make sense of it either. Much like myself trying to remember how my old childhood home was, except for your whole childhood. And teenage years. And if things go on, adulthood too. A whole life of nonsense.” -elbiotipo (on tumblr) The whole post I’d very interesting, and I suggest you look them up. (I’d link the tumblr, but UA-cam HATES links.) But they raise a very, very valid argument, these kids or teens or adults will live a life devoid of context. And that’s why it’s so important to archive these old, creepy, Elsagate, gore edited, random nonsense, videos and websites. It’s such a big deal, yet all we have so far are the passion of archivists. It’s just a crazy situation, and I love learning about everything I can. From oral history (verbal history, word of mouth.) and it’s this intense jumble of horror and wonder, ever heard of kik? Yeah, it’s this crazy crazy world that’s on this web. And it’s all disappearing and reappearing at random intervals, and the stories I’ve heard are crazy. Are they true or not? I’m not one to judge when it comes to this, but it’s CRAZY. It’s why I’m so passionate about it, it’s why I wrote so much. It’s a very interesting thing that is just so important. Either way I hope you have a wonderful day! I enjoyed your video!
I very much appreciate your comment and the passion you put into it. I agree that so much is being lost every single day, and I'm passionate about it too. Hence why I made the video, but it's hard to put into words and something I wanted to bring light to, and hopefully did! I do remember kik, I remember skype, friendster, Flash animations, so many old websites and resources on the internet that are just gone now or are faint memories that will blow away like dust in the wind. I'm glad you liked the video and at least had somewhere to point your emotions and feelings, and could at least let out your feelings, frustrations, and tell someone about it. It means a lot that there are people out there that actually do care about all of this, and everything they can and will do to help preserve memories of times gone past. I hope you have an amazing day yourself c:
The art of decentralization. Anyone can make a website, therefore things come and go, as anyone can make a website at any time and anyone can stop hosting their own website at any time. Though slowly over time the internet is being taken over by large tech companies and are a large part of the media we consume today, removing the magic the internet once had. Though, there is that magic still out there, somewhere. (in short, the internet has no limit, we create the internet, we dont create UNDER the internet, we create THE internet, theres no one in control of the internet, just the websites we visit or control ourselves)
Two of my friends from high school died last fall in a car accident (they got drunk, were speeding without seat belts, and didn't see the turn 5 miles out of town). Their accounts are still active, probably because their family doesn't have access to their passwords and don't know how to use one of the back door options to freeze their accounts. They still get linked all the time in posts and it is depressing to see what is basically a digital ghost pop up now and then.
@@gordoncenafa Half joke, half truth that things have a time limit to them. Not everything worthwhile survives, the ancient world's great libraries are a tale of woe.
Internet is a living, breathing system, of course things get lost to time. What's happening is completely normal. Internet is not dying, its in constant state of renewal. Like how our bodies constantly replace "outdated" cells.
I wouldn't describe the topic as "dark", you gave the true meaning of nostalgia. There is the pang of loss and old memories, or even regret. Then there is the feeling of realization of what happened in the past.
Recently, I’ve been interested in amateur manga translations from the 2000s. I know that sounds a bit weird, but seeing how different, and how similar, the culture surrounding these translation groups are to modern translation groups is really interesting. However, so far, I have ONLY found reuploaded chapters. Not a SINGLE website, blog or UA-cam channel from any of the old tl groups I have looked at still exist. It’s really strange. I wonder where those people are now, if they’re still translating, or if they’re still reading manga at all.
I can relate here. There used to be a translation of a manga I wanted to read, that was entirely translated in English. It’s gone now so I have to get it translated again.
As a website owner who cares about preservation, I regularly try to archive my own site and others I care about, especially if they announce they will shut down. With so many sites already gone, it makes it hard to find older content sometimes, like you mentioned. :(
I used to have a website 😢. It was too expensive to maintain both the domain and the hosting. It was an art portfolio for my web design class. It wasn't anything crazy, but it was my own special place on the internet since it was truthfully my own made from scratch.
I think the memorial thing on fb is interesting but at some point I'm sure facebook might not even exist anymore and they will be turned into dead links. Also think it's interesting how like in some video game and stories they explore the idea that some sort of thing happens where they leave the old internet behind to make a new one whether that be from a cataclysm or just natural progression. Imagine the entire internet just getting left behind for a successor and people going back to the old net to scour for information and for archeology projects to see what life was like from that time and before. The entire internet would be in term a dead net or a giant dead link.
But for that the old net would still need to exist, while current HDDs, SSDs, DVDs or whatever else don't survive even a century. So you need to constantly copy the whole 175ZB (that's 175 * 1024⁷ or roughly about 175 * 10²¹ bytes) of data expected to exist in 2025 to new storages for it to survive for any significant amount of time, or it will just rot in some basement until it's gone...
That's why the Internet Archie's CEO said that it's not true when people say "Once on the Internet, it's there forever". The reality is, everything on the internet will disappear at some point. And it's even worse when we're talking about stuff hosted on private platforms, as those servers will be shutdown eventually and those services and content will be gone forever. Some huge examples are Orkut, MySpace (which had huge data losses) and AOL hometown. Luckily there's some AOL Hometown stuff on the internet archive, and there are Geocities and FortuneCity archives, but those will eventually disappear as well. That's why I have a website that is easy to archive, when I go, and my website is gone, at least hopefully it'll be archived somewhere.
Archive what is important to you. Videos, images, websites, etc. Invest in a external hat drive that’s one or two Terabytes and stockpile it. I’ve got one and I’ve already got a good few folders stuffed with videos that are no longer available on UA-cam and that so far I haven’t found copies of elsewhere. Take it upon yourself to preserve your own little corner of the internet, it’s rewarding
The internet is moving away from standalone websites and more towards huge conglomerate websites. The internet of 2023 is getting boring. all the sites look the same. Everything is corporate. There is no more "bob's little corner on the web" website. You have a facebook/twitter/instagram that looks cookie cutter. I spend most of my time online on the same dozen sites, day after day.
The thought of the internet as a whole, becoming lost media, is a nightmare. I wish our data wasn't in the hands of corporations who didn't care about the responsibility of archiving literal history.
For the stupidest thing, I’ve remembered a video of a gory-like Mario style video game, but with hamburgers, and with 2 worlds that were grass plains (like SMW) and a giant, giant gray techno fortress, presumably underground. I also remember a clown as the boss, and he fought you while you hit him at points in a looping maze. It could be a dream, but I have a feeling that link rot might have taken it, or it was lost to UA-cam’s depths.
I remember there was this doom fan's blog from the early 2000s about the history of doom bots, still up to this day as far as I remember. Specifically what I remember was that it had links to other projects and maps related to the bots that are no longer accessable and I just felt really sad...
4:09 If we multiply the link rot rate per day which 0.02% by 365.2524 (Earth's Year) we get an annual link rot rate of around 7.3%, which means after only 8 years, most resources shared on social media on average for a College Study will be lost or harder to find.
Ya know, when I first saw this video in my recommended, I was like "what?" but now I understand. It's meant to be a happy ending, not some random guy talking nonsense like MatPat and FNAF. Instead, it's told to you calmly without talking down to you, explains examples of how this information is used and is useful, and introduces you to a term that not many people know about. Whenever people such as myself use the Wayback Machine to access these links, it's this sense of joy of looking into the past that can't fully be achieved in the modern age. It's like looking at a fossil in a museum: this thing has withstood the test of time itself, been recovered and people have put their heart and souls into protecting and preserving it. That's what's so beautiful about the internet.
as someone who loves visiting neocities sites, weird hobby blogs, using the wayback machine, & surfing to all the weird corners of the internet, I come across a lot of dead links. this video puts into words what i've been thinking about for a while now.
The twitter thing is actually heartbreaking. Theres a community based of the web show BFDI, the Object Show community. They have been searching for a lost show, that could be the first object show that came after BFDI. It evidence of its existence was only proven when someone found an old twitter account that shared the link to the video, which does not work. So many discoveries and restoration of lost media could be lost when twitter or other platforms start deleting accounts with no way to archive them. Some things are definitely better off being lost but mostly, removing large parts of internet culture, even if niche, is quite harmful to their community and the internet in general
I am in that community and I was always intrigued by this show. I mean, its literally one of the most clear examples that ive ever seen of Link Rot. Just so many places that it could've been is just... Gone. I love object shows, its one of my special interests but having the 2nd object show to be lost is just disappointing to me.
The scary thing is though is that years from now, when everyone we knew from the internet is dead, the other generation won’t know about the people that’s on the internet. However those same videos will still be there. It’s sad and scary. BTW this is actually a good video. You deserve more subs honestly.
What i think is even more scary is the slow rot of driver sources. Like if you have an old PC with an old OS its becoming almost impossible to fully reinstall the old OS because the drivers are just gone from the internet. So the decay of online information can even influence hardware itself, because hardware without drivers are in many cases just useless.
I’m middle aged and this is not weird to me at all. I’ve seen so many types of media become irrelevant. Nobody has 8-track tapes, nobody has laser discs, records are just a collectible and kind of an oddity. I’m not sure why young people would expect anything online to be permanent? Nothing is permanent. And that’s why we need things like the Internet Archive to at least save what we can.
As someone else said. The internet isn't dying. It's forgetting. Part of it is link rot. Another part is the fact that the things people used in the past are no longer compatible with modern browsers. An example is the cancelation of the SWF format. So many artist pages, gone. Simply because the page uses a file type that current browsers no longer read. Well, at least some admins find a way to allow modern browsers to understand their sites.
It is forgetting, yes, but I really wanted to hammer home that the user base is dying and aging as well. If I called it forgetting, that would leave out the concept of the user base dying and vice versa. As well as making a title and thumbnail stand out more. As for the way that the file formats are read that is absolutely true and something I couldn't quite fit into the script. It very much reminds me of television and movie archiving, and how film stock is still considered a great alternative to even some of the modern means, as all film requires is to be shown is light. No VCR, No computer that might not be able to read a specific file type, or a disc drive even. Just some food for thought, thank you for the comment
So, since I first made this video the internet has had quite another big instance of the internet and it's data dying. As most of you probably know or have heard recently Reddit is charging a crazy fee for their API, which is pushing out 3rd party apps in a major way, and in response 300 of the top subreddits are blacking out indefinitely and others are expected to follow suit. I know this might not be that crazy to some, but to others it can be seen as we are living through the end of the easily accessible living internet. Discussions that used to take place on public forums, or more recently reddit pages, are now behind locked sources, private discord servers or other hidden away gems. Soon many of the human interactions and posts made by self made experts freely volunteering their information and knowledge will be gone, possibly replaced by language learning AI bots with the façade of false human interaction. I just hope that there is an alternative in the near future.
There's a few things here:
1. you're a youngin. Website hosting has always had an issue of supporting itself Advertising was the go to answer for allowing for a site to pay the bills so to speak. Advertising on the internet is turning out to not be what it was (yet again. See ads were originally sold per number of hits, then per thousand clicks, and now it's typically a roulette wheel combined with an auction site through google or social media)
2. link rot is actually a good thing when it comes to personal data and just the sheer amount of data and junk bloating the internet. In fact, just as there's services trying to preserve the internet, there's also services trying to remove personal data for you, and perhaps these outnumber the preservation sites.
3. the internet is... well, it's losing its shine and it's maturing as a... thing? It's not the highly idealized archive we expected, it's not the digital library of alexandria. It's ephemeral, and we knew that (but did not want to acknowledge it) when wikipedia was being criticized (and new), for how editable (and thus ephemeral) it was.
Somehow I also remember Penn and Teller having a set of instructions (either a recipe or something), that were on the internet to demonstrate how fallible and wrong information can be presented.(that may have fallen to the wayside), which, in turn, had somehow be edited and itself became some sort of example of the faults of the internet.
This has always been the case.
What's scary in a way, has been that the link rot shows the internet shrinking as our concentration of traffic further shrinks us to visiting maybe 5 or six sites for 90% of our traffic. (google, netflix, facebook, twitter, and a few others). Nobody's bothering to make sites for funsies anymore and the concentration is also a concentration of power...
But then again, both TV and radio have had similar concentrations of power, more regulations, and the wild days of their youth had fallen to the wayside as they matured. Not sure if it's bad or good...
@@SerifSansSerif
Radio seems to be getting looser as it’s dying off.
As a child of the 80s, this is just what the internet has always been. It's not forever. Nothing is. And in a way, that's beautiful.
Seems to me the or one golden age of internet has already passed. Quora and Reddit are awful for sharing/researching information but have killed off the buildalongs and technical websites. Google is really bad for finding anything but things for sale now and most search engines have followed suit. Lot's of information being shared via video, which is ok for some stuff but is really second place when it comes to referencing and folllowing instructions. I feel lucky to have gained from what the internet was, I hope we can resurect the best parts of it.
It's just TotSE collapsing all over again, except TotSE let you say and see ANYTHING, provided it happened to SWIM (Someone Who Isn't Me). Some parts of that place were awful, and others were incredible. Reddit came pretty close to filling that gap though, and so will whatever jumps in to fill that BBS style feed.
Internet monopolies own all the sites which people primarily browse.
The age of millions of forums and sites that were each highly active with their own communities, of which you could only discover by chance or by internet rings, is long gone.
Once we had social media that allowed us to customize every aspect of the page. Now the most we can do is add photos or maybe tweak colors.
The collapse of variety is the true death of the internet.
This right here. People stopped even learning how to build websites, and now with block type editors and templates, it is easy. Definitely no more complex than all the fiddling one has to do to maintain a fb page.
Fuck Monopolies
What??? Thats not true.
There are still so many amazing web projects out there mate.
@@underarmbowlingincidentof1981 it's not about webprojects though it's specifically about social media and social forums
just monopolization, as all of capitalism.
The internet "dying" is a really creepy idea to me. I have lived with the internet my entire life, and just thinking about the stuff that was on the internet when I was born being gone now makes me a little sad.
I was kind of born alongside the the internet I think it's a little bit older then me I was born in 1988.
Think of it as dying but also being born. In this way it mirrors the real world. Whether that’s for better or worse is another story.
@Irrational Pie the world wide web is almost completely dead. the internet is just a big pile of company assets now
I do think this is a good thing partially, because I don't think it is sustainable for us to keep every piece of data there is out there forever. Especially things that do not really contribute very much like some random twitter account and are just taking up space. We have to have some way of cleaning up old data while also being able to keep things people do want kept.
disc rot is also a thing so video game discs are also dying.. and movies.
Internet archiving is going to become a genuine form of -palientalogy- anthropology/archeology
p-a-l-e-o-n-t-o-l-o-g-y
@@Popthebop While i do agree that our archival efforts aren't the best, i think that internet has allowed for experiencing the past in a more pure form than we could in the past.
You can if you archived it, experience what you did in the past in exactly the same way. Because data doesn't degrade, i started up my computer that i haven't touched since like 6 years ago, and it was exactly as i left it. I can in 2 seconds see all my digital drawings of 10 years, all my writing and all my childhood games. I can too in 2 seconds see all the videos i downloaded, some that aren't even online anymore. And the nice thing is, that 10 years ago computers still had x86 architecture and 16x9 displays, so i can display it perfectly as i remember, with my new monitor and computer.
I just said that data doesn't degrade, that isn't fully true, it can die. But data isn't unique and you can just copy it. So when my computers die i can just find a similar device and just copy the whole os 1 to 1 and its like nothing has changed.
Us experiencing most our memories digitally has one upside and that is that it is easy to archive. Unlike carefully preserving a physical object or maximizing the quality in which you can digitize analog data like with VHS tapes or old television series.
Also while you considered it a downside, it really isn't. Strangers around the world having the same memory of yours is great, that means that if you are lucky and reach a big enough audience you can probably find someone who experienced the same thing as you. Which i feel isn't always possible if everyone who has experienced something is localized in one small place.
Archiving is seriously lacking though, because companies simply just don't care AT ALL. Not even when it benefits them financially. Game companies regularly haven't preserved THEIR OWN GAMES. Browsers and Adobe will without hesitation dump a decade of flash content down the drain without even thinking about archiving it. So randos with no experience have to archive everything out of the goodness of their hearts. This and the increasing size of software and media is a recipe for disaster. I'm sure when a petabyte is a normal consumer size for a storage device, games will be 100 TB just because they can.
@@InterDylan honestly true that!
I think I’ve said all I have, but it’s been wonderful conversing!
Grand wishes for your career and life dude!
Hope you have a wonderful day! :O
So true
@@Popthebop I like your brain. It works in a cool way
I love that people told us "be careful what you put on the internet because the internet is forever"
and now that I'm older I'm just like... we were all sooooo naive.
Only the embarrassing stuff will stay forever. The informative/useful stuff: *poof*
@@Shifter-1040ST I still remember when Google used to show websites and not a bunch of retarded news articles. We need to ditch the search engines and go back to the databases
@@meghanachauhan9380sorry bud but nobody but old boomers like you would like that, statistically, people prefer search engines
if you're famous it's forever
@@Lacter12 or infamous
The worst thing about the profiles of dead Facebook users is that some people have nobody who can put their profile into memorial mode, either because they have no friends or loved ones they trust to do so, they didn't know it was an option, or the person trusted to do that for them doesn't know how to do it. My best friend Lily died in 2019, and I still see Facebook mentioning her every so often because her mom either doesn't know how to put it in memorial mode, or doesn't care. I think the latter, because even with Lily's boyfriend asking her about it, it hasn't been done and she hasn't given him permission to do it himself. So I have to get occasional painful reminders of her death because her mom either can't or won't put Lily's account in Memorial Mode.
Maybe it's a way for her to feel like Lily can't be fully forgotten. It could be comforting to an extend
My original Facebook I lost my email so now it will be up forever. I have tried to get it back for years and finally gave up after I quit using Facebook. It will be up forever even if I die
@@vau_st but that's the point of memorial mode, you may be right, but it's wrong, she's holding on to someone who is gone, don't forget them but don't keep them tied to the earth when their gone. Give them the memorial and let them pass on
"Memorial mode" sounds so fucking dystopian, I don't know how to put it, deleting her account would be a better option
@@jarate8076 I kind of agree with you on an immediate reaction point of view, but really using social media accounts as memorials to the dead are a great next step to what we already do physically.
The only problem is, is that they belong to private companies who at any moment can change what they do with it for any reason, or even if they promise no to, could get a new owner who doesn't care about the past and fucks everything up (like Elon with Twitter)
What is needed is a nonprofit, public online memorial service for the sake of archivists and future historians that will be link rot and dead internet proof
I’ve experienced this myself. Little corners of the internet, lonely nooks, isolated spots only a few hundred people have ever viewed (and even less have remembered). I’ve made friends, witnessed history, had unimaginable fun. And now it’s all gone. One day I return to that little hidey hole and find the entrance has been sealed up, as if it were never there, and everyone’s moved on and forgotten.
I miss them sometimes.
I'm surprised "link rot" isn't a more widespread term considering how common the issue is.
Another great video glad to see you're continuing with this type of content!
Also it's just a cool sounding term, really sounds ominous, but it fits the description so well.
That's because they're trying to keep all of this under wraps. Why else do you think they would be eliminating vast swaths of internet history with no one noticing, and with it, the first quarter of the 21st century?
Well that's because rarely anyone cares about it. MOST of the people that are using the internet browse through one or the other social media platform and use nearly exclusively "internal" content at best having a few inter-site links that lead to other big social media platforms, and as a matter of fact those links rarely decay if ever at all. Not to mention barely anyone(in absolute numbers) looks up the "old data" that is not on one of the "big websites" on any semblance of regular basis, so at best you average user may just very ocassionaly encounter link rot. Also do keep in mind that MOST of the rotten links come from small **personal** websites or blogs, that just pop in and out of existence, like faulty christmass lights, and rarely anyone cares to keep the url convention consistent(i mean even some companies like hp don't care for that, so what do you expect from any random person) or edit the old articles to adress the changes.
This also puts into perspective just how much we rely on FTANG in our daily internet activities, and it's actually very frightening.
@@Shonicheck And that is our job at Wayback Machine!
@@LuigiCotocea god bless the internet archive
Link rot is a serious issue on Wikipedia, actually. I made a thesis about this enciclopedia, and I had to use Wayback Machine (a website that stores old versions of other websites) to check almost half of the resources I needed (academic articles, newspaper articles, videos, photos, forums...). Popular and important articles relied on fonts that dated years, and in some cases weren't even up anymore. Well, while I'm glad Wikipedia can keep up with all the information it has for years and years, I'm concerned about all the information we lose every day. Two years later, I always find myself going to Wayback Machine when working on a project, and it is very annoying.
I see how there are so many countries that really only have a page and almost all of the sources are lost. I was looking for flags of a random african nation for my Iron Assault map, (a roblox game) and there was NOTHING. No flags, no description. It was a dead link in the most horrifying way possible. It shows up as a name, but its redded out. There was zero info on the country besides a quick description in the main page of the modern nation.
Just wait till they sue and remove the Internet Archives!
@@splitsee2526 what country?
@@JarvisJenkins12345 i forgor
@@splitsee2526 And yet you want the internet to remember.
;)
I think this phenomenon is better described this as "the internet is forgetting" instead of "the internet is dying".
For the internet to be dying, the volume of new content and user access needs to be less than the rate of information being lost (on average, obviously). Basically, if the internet is in a prolonged state where it "forgets" more than it "learns", then it's dying.
To say it's dying when it's merely forgetting (which itself is a problem, don't get me wrong), conjures images of that one South Park episode where the global internet goes down.
was having this same feeling all throughout the vid - forgetting is a good term here
is it just that we’re aggregating more content into an oligopoly? A couple of large websites dominating the information flow?
I think you have a good point. Forgetting sounds like a better term for this topic. Especially if there might be some cyclical internet trends that might've already occurred a while ago...not sure I can think of some good examples to support this. But I'm pretty sure there might be.
Maybe, but tbh those are only hyperlinks, this dumbass doesn’t know the difference between a domain name or an IP address
You are right "the internet is forgetting" is a way better way of express what is happening currently
Link Rot is something I know way too well as a Sims CC hunter. SO many shut down websites, 404 errors, and blogs being wiped out of existance.
Another thing is ao3. I hope it never gets taken down. It has archived fan content from so many years past it is a vital piece of so many communities.
A03 is my little haven when it comes to fanfiction about lesser-knowm series or minor characters/ships, especially a Light Novel series called Ascendance of a bookworm. I've read so many stories on A03, enjoyed it so much, if it ever deleted it's old catalog and 'forgot' itself, I would be emotionally devastated over losing a large part of the stories that touched my life. I've read on A03 since the early 2010's in my childhood, so it 'forgeting' would be the same as my childhood local park getting demolished and replaced with a golf course for rich adults only.
@@zealmilenio177 me too!! I haven’t been reading as long as you, but I don’t know what I’d do for fan content without ao3. 450 bookmarks later and it’s still my go-to for fanfic. Older communities also thrive there! I found a Trigun fic from 2001 that is *still* getting traction! This site is so important to so many people, it’s a piece of internet history.
I had this same problem with Sims cc actually. It’s crazy how many sites were down!!
so many cc creators that have quit, and their files only exist with people who downloaded them
It's probably because they knew they were going to introduce AI so they had to clean it up to give it good sources of information and make it quicker to search through.
There was a website that I posted poems and short stories on as a teen, made for students. You could also ask questions, whether simple or heavy, and forums for talk. As well as a space to post general questions to other students. Last I checked, it was gone. There were some stories that I know I didn't save anywhere else. May have to see if somewhere it was memorialized but, considering I don't remember the username, seems impossible to find.
Damn that sucks
Yeah there’s been a lot of things I wish I could see again too. When I was a bit younger I’d just save things using tools available within websites or apps. I learned the hard way that most of those aren’t permanent. I didn’t realize for a while that there’s a relatively low cap on the number of Reddit pages you can save, that saving a UA-cam video to a playlist doesn’t prevent it from getting taken down, and that saving a message in Snapchat doesn’t make it impossible to delete. All that media feels like it was a part of me once. Almost like actual memories, just more clear than real ones.
Speaking of which, there’s one video on UA-cam in particular that I was wondering if anyone has or knows where to find it. It was a short minute long video of some dramatic/inspiring music over colorized footage of German and American paratroopers (I think it was 90% German though) in the second word war. I had originally stumbled across it after watching the original Fallschirmjager remix music video thing. Of course UA-cam took them both down because they like to erase anything related to the half of history they don’t like but some people, like myself, save stuff like that before it gets taken down.
I’m more than willing to help others hunt for what they’ve lost too. Just reply to my comment and I’ll see what I can do. Best of luck.
@@jlight7346 I'd love to help, even if I'm unsure if I'll actually be able to.
I've mostly been looking for old (Mostly Kinder) commercials (one even to this day), but I don't mind hunting for other stuff either.
So uh... Count me in?
@@kaydubsthekoifish Glad to have you on board! I'd be able to help if you could give me a more specific description of the media you're referring to.
Worst thing ever
Here's my two cents:
Cent 1: You shouldn't rely on the internet archive. It's an awesome resource and incredibly helpful, but it has way too many issues and blind spots to be the only place to depend on (this applies to all similar big projects, not just IA specifically). If you truly care about something you have to save a local copy for yourself.
Cent 2: Archival should be proactive, you should already save (and if appropriate submit to IA) everything you care about because you never know when something will disappear and whether anyone else cared to save it. It often isn't that difficult to do either, eg with yt-dlp or its GUI frontends you can usually just put in a link to your favorite youtube playlist or something and download it all with a press of a button - it's at the very least a lot easier than trying to track down a copy of that one missing song in your music playlist years later.
I know the amount of content disappearing is a statistic most people don't have a grasp of, but I do UA-cam archival and I literally see thousands of videos disappearing every single month, most of them not in the IA, and that's a statistic based on just the videos in my own archive alone.
I have this BIG playlist of animatics, animations, and mixed media. And the stuff I put in like 2 years ago, or even a month ago it keeps getting deleted. So I second this
@@Popthebop Sometimes I get into a type of media that was popular years ago (right now unfortunately being Homestuck) and it feels so depressing trying to find videos from the time it was popular only to be met with a blank screen or unavailable video. Sometimes I try to find videos or websites I loved to visit when I was little only to be met with disappointment. It’s even worse on websites like tiktok where people seem to delete their videos not even a year after posting them, just because they’ve moved on from that interest
bah everything die at some point, not means internet die
now don't misunderstand, im obsessive compulsive but still realistic
The amount of videos i like. I saw a bunch of them gone.
Ima archive my fave songs that way.
I've been building websites for 20 years, and have one that has lasted that long, and I see what you mean. Part of what happened was the advent of php and database driven blogs replacing static pages. A few years ago though, some of us learned the hard way that this was a kind of bad trade. We did so much work to make our sites more interactive and improve our SEO only for the search engines to change and stop truly promoting the most informative and accurate content, them and social media use algorithms to promote ads and people who paid them or paid them more, and finally being forced to compete with both that and clickbait and malicious sites. It all became too much of a headache to be invisible to everyone except our niche communities anyway, so there was no point in fighting for place in a system that was going to ignore us when it could and obscure us when it couldn't. So most of us have a static HTML version of our sites again, and many are exploring Gemini and other alternative coding for static pages. As long as someone pays our hosting (most of us make arrangements for family to do so) they'll be there. What is killing a lot of sites lately is the expectation of visibility. They get on the internet to be seen outside of their circles and there's this hope of "going viral". Once they see there is no hope for most people, they either mature into understanding this is a means of communication and focus on those who actually do want to see or hear them, or they give up and don't bother finding other ways of using the internet. So yeah the internet is dying as we know it, but what will result is something like networks. This is why I'm enjoying the Fediverse. It's kind of there already.
I really like Fediverse too...
wtf is the Fediverse
@@chemplay866 It's an area of the internet wherein people communicate with each other and share stuff without a billionaire middleman controlling what you do and don't get to post or see. You or your community do your own regulation.
@@nicolelasher cool!
Yup. If I want to communicate with somebody, I don't use the internet.
The archives are slowly disappearing
When the archives disappear it becomes harder to find past information it might become permanently lost if not archived again
Companies and other organizations might want to control or destroy archives for their own interests
It happens quietly most of the time without people noticing
The internet is centralizing at accelerating rates
are there any web portals that go-to old school blogs or forum pages?
what fediverse apps can i use to self-regulate my own internet communications with people?
i really want to reduce dependence on this stupid website, youtube.
@@motherchuckair404
Delete the UA-cam app from phone, use it only for anything that is useful
@motherchuckair404 There are various services you can use, but they all lack features and functionalities we've come to expect or find to be intrinsic nowadays.
Federated alternatives tend to suffer from a lack of low-quality content, little user engagement, and a lack of apparent need; all of which can halt or hinder development and growth.
Nonetheless, you can find them if you want, or even create your own. I'm on my phone right now, so I can't link to anything because of the inherent difficulty. Sorry.
The trouble started when people hopped onto social media en-masse just because it was convenient.
I think you mistake the popularity with longevity.
Even frickin UA-cam is in real danger of losing their monopoly.
It's all a cycle of life and death, and some "immortalization". (Nukes can kill us all and wipe everything out) Nothing is truly immortal. Memories fade just as new cases arise.
The Internet Archive/The Way Back Machine really just take snapshots, you might find a page you liked on it and all the links aren't archived. For instance, the page of recipes from Soup Plantation had tons of recipes and of them only 2 are archived.
sometimes it does, ive even found old mods for obscure old games from 2006 i thought were gone forever cos they are hosted/archived download links somehow on the wayback machine
I've run into this exact same issue, and it extends to capturing images. The older the page, the more likely there's nothing left but text and a barebones framework of empty spots where pictures used to be. I understand that images are expensive to host, but it's immensely frustrating.
Isn't the Internet Archive in danger of being shut down currently?
Then thing is you should archive them yourself I did that aswell, with a extremely rare song sang by Dame Vera Lynn in 1935, only 100 copies were issued, of almost all have been lost. There is not much data available of it, but I archived it and downloaded it, to be safe, to safe history and the amazing talent of the Orchestra and singer.
The entire concept of taking a snapshot doesn't really sound very smart to me. Snapshot is heavy probably a few MB long. Compare the actual text is actually just a few bites long. People should have a type the text and not the snapshots. Less space per piece means more pieces can be stored
And imagine... before the internet, all this kind of stuff was lost from the start. Not everything can or needs to be preserved, but put in the effort to preserve the stuff that is truly important.
Your right, that makes me feel a little better. I’m just so afraid to lose something i might find important later
And imagine... being a mindless npc like yourself.
There's so, ever so much of the 90s Internet that has been lost forever. So much that I stumbled on since 1993 that I'd never be able to find again. One thing I learned is that if you find something online that you want to keep for yourself, you don't just save the link to it. You download it. I've c/p'd so much text and grabbed so many image and sound files and PDFs now. And if you're really serious about it then you have that all backed up on other drives and other media.
Same
I have several favorite fanfics copy and pasted into word documents for exactly this reason.
Yea but my backup hard drive also died.
i've looked at some old pages that are still there and they aren't really useful anymore and the internet had only sort of began then with but people couldn't connect or get it to work. Back then websites were only a bit useful but it was difficult to search through it all and it was slow.
It was just a lot of playing around with it then to see what could be done with it with a few sites for games and some forums and chat rooms. But other than that it still wasn't that useful since most people didn't have internet back then most areas didn't allow you to connect despite offering it for a few pounds or dollars. It wasn't until 2003 that we started to have fast computers and internet connections.
please keep internet archive alive guys. if you're gonna spend any amount of money on the internet, please donate a little to internet archive
One day i feel that the internet will turn off. Just hit it's limit and we'll have to start over.
I hear so many people talk about the future "singularity" as if all the data on the internet could create the perfect artificial intelligence if it were only just all coalesced together and analyzed right, with the right algorithmic trickery or whatever technological wizardry. Like the internet will ascend to some higher being basically a technological god. But what if it "hit it's limit" indeed. I feel like if we reach a critical mass of stuff out there, especially of complete bullshit, the internet and all these new AI that are being developed... will just collapse into a miasma of complete garbage information that means nothing. Old content gets deleted or forgotten or drowned out in a soup of self destructing infinitely generated bullshit. That might be the future of the internet if we aren't careful. Who knows.
I wish. Carrington! Carrington! CARRIINGTON!! No that would cause so much death and destruction, but if it happened I would still have to smile for a second before I think about the downsides
that's like claiming libraries will one day "hit their limit" and we'll suddenly have to just burn all the books. The internet will churn through content, and i doubt that people will be able to read "this" in 500 years, but the idea that it will need a hard reset makes no sense
It'll keep going on.
Its just that things today will be buried under digital rot after a couple decades.
It'll still be useful, just old things will be harder to get access to.
That’s not really how the internet works, if something apocalyptic happened to the internet it would happen over time
To me, "the internet is dying" means something else. While in the beginning there were so many interesting things like websites, blogs, forums, etc. created and/or run by real people, genuine enthusiasts of some specific thing, now everything is just ads and "content" created by companies. It often looks genuine, but it's just clever advertising. Even many people's profiles on social media or dating apps are often bots. While before everything was real and internet meant real connection, now most things are fake, only meant to harvest your data or convince you to buy something. Everything's synthetic, content is generated instead of created, and you're talking to bots instead of people. THIS is what really shows that internet is dying. Fck that.
It's strange to think of just how recent the internet is. Nowadays I feel like it's always been there, and it's hard to remember the days when I didn't have internet access everywhere I go through a smartphone, even though I'm 30 and witnessed the evolution of it. The blogs I created between the ages of 12 and 17, the Harry Potter website I had at the time, the forums I was a part of, and so many websites I used to visit daily are all gone.
This video pointed out many things I hadn't thought of before. Great work again! I'm glad you're enjoying making them. Hope you keep it up!
You're about to relive it with AI, although currently we only have language prediction models, they aren't sentient the way a cat is. They just compute the next word for a topic.
But generalized AI and the use of AI of all kinds is shifting everything and it started with algorithms for attention.
damn sorry to hear that
rip Sugar Quill
This has been bothering me more and more over the past couple of years. It's like a midlife crisis, but I'm barely into my adult life. The internet is so ethereal. There is so much information I've found that I want to keep forever, like artwork, videos, stories, and articles, that could disappear at any moment. I download a lot of things I want to keep, but even those copies will eventually fade with bit rot. All of those memories and unique pieces will disappear, and then what will those years of my life be worth? So, I'm trying to make a change. I'm creating my art on paper, canvas, and wood instead of digitally. If I draw digitally, I'll print the results on archival paper. I'm trying to get back into reading physical books and going outside to experience the real world. Nothing lasts forever, but at least those can't be deleted at any moment.
Physical art is great, but for videos and digital art have you considered saving them on an external hard drive? You'd need to back that up and transfer it every few years, but a terabyte of storage isn't that expensive. Would be a good way to preserve the stuff that doesn't archive well in a physical state or that you don't have room for.
@@moseyonover733 Yes, I have a couple of external hard drives, but I'm terrible at keeping them up-to-date. I definitely need to make regular backups part of my routine. Another problem is that I have tens of thousands of files that need to be combed through, many of which are duplicates, no longer needed, or part of a long series of copies of one project with slight differences between each step. Thank you for the suggestion! I've been meaning to do this for years, so I will make myself start today. Probably...
@@Tyneras You can do these things already, just one step at a time. For converting media, write a batch script with FFmpeg. For tagging and naming, ExifTool. For duplicates, dupeGuru. Even the gifs can be slowed down with FFmpeg.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal". All physical things will decay inevitably. Not saying you shouldn't archive all that stuff, it's a wise thing to do. And I feel you about getting physical books. Even if its more expensive and vulnerable to fires and such, I trust them way more than the internet and flashdrives these days. But remembering there's something else after this life makes me way less anxious about it all
The irony, haha
The internet was supposed to be the ultimate archive, repository of information
I feel like I shouldn't get so upset about the internet changing and things getting deleted but I just can't help it. So much of our history, our discussions, _who we were_ throughout different eras just being GONE is genuinely upsetting. Humans of old had stone tablets, tapestries, books, etc to record their history and daily lives, but our lives are online and vulnerable to erasure. We are entirely reliant on the internet and it could be gone at any moment.
Case in point- in 2015 I logged in to my old myspace account fully expecting a blast of nostalgia. The last time I had been active on there was around 2009, so I was really excited to reread my old blog posts and messages and download all my old pictures. But the whole site was completely unrecognizable and almost all of my content was missing. All messages gone. All blog posts gone. All but maybe 10 pictures gone. I'm not ashamed to say that I actually cried. My entire online life from age 22-28 was gone. I later found out that myspace hadn't been practicing good backup hygiene and something like 90% of user data got lost during a server migration shortly before I had logged back on. If I had logged in only a few months earlier I could have saved everything. I won't lie, I'm still not over that lol. I had a similar experience trying to log back in to Beliefnet, anyone else remember Bnet? It was a huge discussion site for religion, spirituality, and all sorts of random topics and I was on there every day in the very early 2000s chatting with people. I tried to get back on there a while ago hoping to find my old posts, but all the discussion forums were gone. The whole site is just a small selection of articles now. Thousands of messages from real humans from cultures all over the world, erased forever.
I'm autistic so I'm probably getting overly emotional about this, but the thought of huge chunks of human history just disappearing scares the shit out of me. It hurts my heart. I'm going to start keeping a paper journal again, but there really needs to be some sort of widely applicable solution for this problem.
worse they are at the mercy of people who regularly destroy things like tapestries books nature ect for their own greed
Can't agree with your last sentence enough. Keep a hard copy of everything you cherish.
Most stone tablets made for whatever reasons are also probably completely destroyed or unreadable, maybe because of intentional destruction, maybe someone wanted to write something else, maybe they got into the ocean and can't be found, maybe buried so deep that you can't realistically find them there. Nothing is forever, but hey we even have fossils of the beginnings of life, so future civilizations will be exactly like us needing to reconstruct history from some partial information from different sources
I think the unfortunate truth is that to some extent there is simply too much information for anyone to care enough to hold on to. A lot (but definitely not all) of the writings that have survived the test of time have been things that are more significant beyond a sentimental value. Not saying people shouldn't put more effort into archiving these things given that for the first time in history we have a very easy way of doing so (and I encourage you to do so if you have the time and will), but at some point its hard to justify archiving hundreds of gigabytes of forum posts that nobody is going to reread.
@@guero9896 This is a good point.
The prospect for Facebook could actually be worse than becoming mostly dead people's accounts by 2060. Meta could shut the whole thing down well before then if it becomes unprofitable or they want to push everybody to a more modern platform. If this happens, they'll likely try to do right by their users by offering a time-limited opportunity to download all their posts, but many people won't bother to do this and their content could be relegated to an offline backup stored in a warehouse somewhere and become lost to time.
I downloaded all my photos then deleted Facebook. Then I reinstalled windows to get rid of some malware. After I realized my photos were gone, but was comforted because no other generation in human history was shackled by that many photographs.
Facebook is entirely unsafe it was one of two i left first you need to clean your temporary data every day so your account doesn't get hacked into which it will within 48 hours because they leave open back doors for them, if you have apps enabled they can hide an app on that will keep hacking in.
I started being spied upon on there and my privacy being stepped on and then i had a weird incident happen right before the analytica scandal went public where i saw the dude with ginger hair appear in the online list on the side, and then somehow somebody was able to send me a dm to try and get me to sign up to a different social media despite my settings being set to private and friends only. I have no idea what was happening but it got weirder and then it settled down a bit after i got a new facebook but i still felt i was being watched so i finally got rid of it.
Then i got rid of twitter because it just turned really mean and elon turned the feed into a lot of very reactive posts, so i doubt these social media sites have anything important on them most of it is just junk and memes no real interesting discussions had mostly selfies or pictures of their food lol not going to be useful or interesting to future generations.
"Cringe is not a crime" made me feel so uplifted!
Yeah
It's not a crime but some people find some things weird
Cringe culture is dead .
@@MechanicMind01 then they should probably stay off the internet. 😉
People have been discussing how the internet archive may be taken down due a a lawsuit it's currently battling that it seems very likely to lose. Though it may only be speculation that it'd be taken down if it lost, it's still obviously a possibility, so that'd be a lot of internet history, and just general history taken away.
Unlikely. The lawsuit specifically covers IA's ebook loan program. Unless the consortium of publishers decides to be really vindictive with the costs, the wayback machine part will be unaffected. There's no reason for the publishers to do that, given how it would tarnish their own reputations.
@@vylbird8014 publishers when i then just pirate their shit
@@vylbird8014that doesn't "tarnish their reputation", sadly most of the world wouldn't even notice. But I think there's a significant number of people who have so many good reasons for supporting the IA and also Wikipedia, which has a shit load of money lying around for a site financed by donations, relies on the IA so I think they would help as well.
This just goes to show that the internet as such is an organism that made up of many cells. It constantly evolves. Cells die, new ones emerge. Like any form of life. It's not sad, it's actually
beautiful.
It's not a terrible analogy, it's not a great one. Cells are replaceable and differ from their neighbors in mostly irrelevant ways, old websites lost to time were unique in very profound ways. In many tissues, cells must die and be replaced for the tissue itself to remain healthy. But not in all tissues. And more importantly, there's no real reason why websites should die and be replaced like these cells would, most old websites were just a few kilobytes of text data in size and could still be hosted or archived with no harm done to the rest of the internet.
Do you look at a plague where a parasite is thriving at the expense of an entire species going extinct and say retarded shit like "this is so beautiful"?
Beautiful until the cancer ate it all alive.
I think of it more like a biosphere/
With different ecosystems. Different countries even have their own Internet speeds and servers .. So stuff doesn't always connect perfectly, especially in countries with oppressive governments.
We do however quickly shift from a user generated web to a corporate one that is mostly geared towards social media and shopping.
I thought you were more popular, just noticed the numbers. I'm 100% your channel will blow up like a popsicle stand. You're good at finding interesting things, and explaining them. I hope internet fame won't suck
getting popular isn't so hard as keeping that popularity
I hate it when I go buy a popsicle and end up getting blown to smithereens 😔
@@JohnDoe-jk3vvlmao
Imagine reddit collapsing and just how much link rot that could lead to.... With this blackout I've already lost access to so many bookmarked content.
The internet has been dying since UA-cam got ads. Nothing online is permanent. I got tired of songs and things i liked disappearing so i started buying physical copies. Y'all can be online n cry about things getting taken down.... I'll be at home with by books, dvds, cds, and traditional art. I think money really ruined the internet. It really was a fun free thing before. Remember when AMV's weren't taken down for copyright strikes? Because they were made by teens just makin vent art. I miss those days. Nobody was claiming they made the anime or songs and nobody attacked them.
I can join you in nostalgia for the early days. It was not a 'serious' place back then. The stakes were low because the internet was just a hangout for nerdy engineering students and tech enthusiasts. People hacked websites for fun all the time, and it was always funny when some company homepage got defaced - law enforcement seldom cared. No one used their real name, ever, because what happened online was expected to stay online. It was a parallel world, existing beside the real one but barely interacting with it.
You'll be home with those until a fire.
This honestly saddens me. I regularly preserve old media whenever I come across it and a part of my process is finding any and all journals, blog updates, dev notes, etc. from said media on their old legacy websites. I've luckily found a handful, but some are gone forever. There's no cache, no "Internet Time-Machine" time-stamp, or any archive. And to top it off, as you mentioned at the beginning of your video, there's decay (or as I call it dilapidation. Like a building rotting).
Very glad you brought up the occurrence of account owners dying before they give any thought to their digital presence after they pass. I remember looking up an actress I saw in a great film a while back, and it turns out she died roughly a year and a half prior; her Instagram and Twitter accounts were simply hanging in the balance, as if she was on hiatus from social media and would be back at some point later on. I wonder if social media accounts will be acknowledged in wills soon, especially for accounts belonging to larger creators, seeing as those profiles may be capable of generating substantial amounts of ad revenue which could support family and loved ones post-mortem.
It's fascinating how the death of information online mirrors the historical erasure of knowledge, from works being lost and leaving behind just citations and fragments (how articles and websites are citing sources that are no longer available) to the efforts of keeping said knowledge alive through archives and restoration.
Makes you think, how many civilizations existed before with absolutely no record because the records *died*
There is already so much out there we can't know, or have no idea about. Or even if we do, that we just know they existed and nothing more. Really makes you think
Civilizations leave lots of other evidence of their existence behind, other than written records, and not all civilizations had written records. However there actually are many books and such that we know existed, but are now lost, which is a shame. It’s quite an interesting topic, too. There’s also things like the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui, which no one alive can read anymore.
The Library of Alexandria...
@@gordoncenafaalso there object of stuff that also are lost or contiued trying to be found
The Entire Internet is experiencing possibly the whole existence of the Universe in just a few decades. From the big bang, to the current solar system, to the Red Giant, and then to the Heat Death of the Universe.
OF COURSE Elon would do that. When you think twitter can't get any worse...
It gets worse when you learn the only reason he’s changing the policy is because he wants to spite NPR. Elon deliberately mislabeled NPR as “state funded media” despite NPR explaining him multiple times privately that it’s not true. As a result NPR made a statement that they were leaving the platform permanently. Elon then publicly threatened them, saying he would take away their @ if they left and give it to someone else. Then he released that post about removing inactive accounts. Yes. He is that petty
We gotta stop letting narcissists be billionaires
Owning a billion dollars should require mental screening or something
It's more dangerous than owning a gun
It's more dangerous than owning a icbm probably
A billion dollars spent the right way can change the course of history so it should either be regulated to where no individual can have that much wealth or that you need special regular mental checkups and screenings and whatnot
Twitter is a shitehole.
I have no issue with the acceleration of its demise.
But that’s been a thing since like 2020, when I deactivated my account in 2020 it said that inactive accounts will be gone in 30 days.
His mom failed to understand why he was foretold to become humanity's enemy. Destroying our capacity to remember is BEYOND white-collar crime!?!
I encountered this recently with Yahoo mail. I had a mail account that had existed since about 2003, when I was 9 years old. I rarely used it anymore as I went into the 2010s, since I'd switched to Gmail like most people, but it was a nice archive of my childhood. I had emails from long lost friends, encouraging emails I had written to myself using a website that sent emails "into the future", old pictures and videos, and also login info for a plethora of older sites. I would occasionally log back in every year or so, either to reminisce or reset passwords for old sites.
Well, in 2020 Yahoo suddenly decided to change their data policy. If you didn't log in to your email for _one year_ your entire inbox would be wiped and deleted. Not archived or hidden or anything recoverable, just straight up, irrecoverably gone.
So, there went a good portion of memories from my childhood. I'm a very sentimental person, and generally do a lot to archive my digital memories, but there's only so much you can do with how chaotic the internet is.
My best advice is: if you want to remember something digital, keep it on a physical analog storage like a CD or hard drive; even USBs and SSDs aren't completely safe as they can degrade over time, essentially giving them a shelf life (ideally they can store data indefinitely, but only if you plug them in every few years or so).
Oh thanks for this! I better turn on my ssd i have.
I had saved tons of photos of visual novel. That game got eos’d twice! 😢 still never read the other routes. My fave route is perserved.
So informative! I had no idea about any of this so thanks for condensing this topic into an easy + interesting format for me to digest. This makes the fight to keep internet archive websites up way more important :( sad to think just how much we’d lose without Internet Archive
It's really sad to see our digital heritage dying over time. I've been saving everything I like and making backups on different drives in different locations to not lose essentially my childhood, the things which made me who I am.
internet sites dying/lost feels incredibly Better sweet. I have things i and friends made that are now lost media(either for technical failure or a website getting shut down) and while it kinda sucks they are gone, knowing they are fighnight make them feel more important to appreciate them while they are still here. beautiful video mate, great work.
Also fuck elon, 30 days?!? ik people's private/backup accounts that don't get touched for more than that holy shit
Just wanted to leave a comment to thank you for making this channel and these videos. No matter how much the old internet may be degrading, it feels great to see new channels like yours pop up and continue where others leave off. Your content is great and I can't wait to be here when your channel grows enough to be considered "mainstream", because it will. Good luck with everything!
Before people had tons of websites to visit. Now there are just a few sites and social media people use daily. UA-cam is a good example.
I deeply regret deleting my childhood youtube channel. From ages 8-13 I was uploading videos almost every day of my life. I deleted the entire channel at 13 or 14 because I was transitioning and didn't want videos of my old self up at the time, but as an adult I think about the fact I could've had this expansive documentation of my life as a kid to look back on. I was always taught to treasure the past and my memories growing up through things like my grandparents old video cameras, so I'd love more than anything to get that channel back. I've tried with youtube's support many times but it seems like once you delete a channel that wasn't archived, it's near impossible to retrieve. Of course if anyone reading this knows anything about deleted channels and if it is in any way possible to retrieve them I'd love to hear any suggestions, but right now it seems like all of it is gone for good.
Ive had a simular case happen for me as well, ever since I was 5 years old I would always make videos with this app called E-CAM im sure, it was an old recording app from 2000s that was most likely forgotten but every single day I would record myself doing something with my siblings, playing a game, playing with filters or some random wierd thing
No exaggeration I had hundreds of videos on it and they were all saved in my very old laptop. It had memories of when I lived in my old house and everything I did back then, but when I was 10-11 years old, the laptop slowly stopped working as well as before, and we decided to throw it away forever
I never thought it years ago when we threw it away, but almost everyday now I realize that we threw away what was probably more than 1,000 of recorded memories from my childhood. I never uploaded the videos anywhere so I cant watch them again either. I really miss the videos, I wish I could rewatch them now that im older, but it taught me a lesson which is to always appreciate what you have before its gone. (and to archive your stuff)
I’m glad I saved everything I could from childhood. Still lots of things got thrown or given away by my mom cleaning up the house. Most of the toys and stuff I kept are worth a lot of money now. I had a Homie Hopper RC car I bought for $25 and sold it for $250 on EBay. I wish I had a video camera when I was a kid. I want to remember what I was like and hear my kid voice. I also had a laptop from my middle school years filled with pictures and the hard drive failed. I never threw it out so I could get it repaired, it would just be expensive.
I'm delighted that you made a video on the dead internet that isn't about the Bot invasion but the actual decay process.
It's almost organic, isn't it?
Been around online since early 2000s so i've had to get used to this for a while. Almost all the early stuff is long gone and mostly not on the internet archive in any meaningful way. Trying to save everything i find valuable is simply impossible, it would take so long and use terabytes of data. I think we need to do more to have some kind of tracability and ability to preserve before things disappear, but also sometimes you have to accept that what we care about can and will disappear in the blink of an eye.
I always find it funny when they put links from the internet in a book as a references. First, they are gone in a couple of years; second, it is redicilous to type long links.
Yea i got a lot of books from 1995 to 2005 with that and all the links are long dead. i am surprised how early they started doing this a lot of people didn't have internet yet in the late 90s. also remember when theyvstarted putting cd roms in books the cd's would only work on windows 9x.
Of course, the real reason why the internet is "dying" is that the handful of conglomerates that provide access to it have reached the level of control where they are able to systematically delete everything that isn't paid-for corporate advertising (even if it poses as "user-made content"). And they are doing this.
Thanks for talking about the whole link rot thing.
sometimes I have saved links and tweets to things that I want to go back to after writing my thoughts about thing I saw there. And just want to look more into the topic later. But sometimes it ends up no longer being there in the link I saved. Most of the time I can go back and see it in wayback, but sometimes it ends up not being there. Or it ends up getting scrubbed from a place like UA-cam due to a copyright claim despite being there for years because the larger company overall wants to drive traffic to their new streaming service add-on and doesn't want as much attention put on those full episodes uploaded by fans or the clips. I thought this kind of stinks, especially if someone didn't want to watch the full episode or have the streaming service for the full series, and just wanted to watch a particular point or clip and wanted to share it with somebody. :(
your fault for not archiving whatever you want to keep
@@無名-l3b yeah 😞
damn,
I'm not a nostalgic guy. But I truly miss being able to know a lot of websites for specific purposes.
One for music, one for games, a forum for an anime I was watching, another forum about the band I like.
Now everything is a sub-reddit or a facebook group page.
It feels a bit odd.
Having been a massive weeb in the mid 2000s, I can definitely say I get link rot. I have so many memories of fansites that I absolutely loved that are now… gone. Beautiful sites with so much effort and it’s all just dead with geocities, angelfire, and yahoo groups.
Of course I imagine a lot of those sites may have been run without reasonable ways to fund its existence not to mention the fact that these fans more than likely grew out of the fandoms.
Mostly I just miss the customization of classic internet. Every website looks the same now :(
As an early 80s kid, I saw this when it began to happen.
When social media blew up, the personal, quirky websites died as well...
I actually really miss the days when people just started a crappy website to describe themselves, their art, commentary and pretty much anything.
These websites would probably just *scream* "cRiNgE!!!!!11" to the younger people, but it was actually surprisingly easy to find like-minded individuals due to - links, for one - and most of all the amazing "Guestbooks".
It felt more sincere and intimate, especially since almost everyone shared their e-mail adresses.
This "clean" and uniform internet that I see today is barely a resemblence to what I grew up with, and I genuinly miss it to a pretty high extent.
Excellent videos, by the way 🙌
Also surprised that link rot apparently isn't rather widely known, it's been around for many years
Because they don't want people knowing that it exists.
@@dividedstatesofamerica2520 Who doesn't want people to know?
@@zingorideslegocreations3729 These corrupt money grubbing big tech companies like google and the like.
@@zingorideslegocreations3729 the big rot
@@zingorideslegocreations3729 COMMUNISM!!!
i hate america... gr
i'm glad i'm not the only one who noticed. the internet just feels emptier than it used to be.
Amazing video. It's kinda sad to think that so much humanity will be lost... but its good that so much more is being created every millisecond
I do a lot of amateur research on traditional Chinese folk culture and martial arts.
I have watched so many sources of obscure historical information disappear over the years.
There was a time when local governments such as county government in China all made their own web pages.
At the time they all tried to feature the history and culture of their county on their pages in order to attract tourism.
Many of these pages featured articles written by local folk historians on niche aspects of history and folk culture.
There were countless articles on obscure styles of martial arts, dance, cooking, local gods, festivals, myths etc. Often these were ancient traditions only retained in a single village.
These weren't academic articles. Many were written by local academics but not published in academic journals and many by regular people who had dedicated their lives to documenting dying local traditions and history.
Many of these people who wrote these articles are now dead and the articles are available nowhere but on these local government sites. Not only that but in many many cases they were the only source of information on these traditions anywhere online.
Unfortunately in the last decade almost all of these articles have been pulled from local government sites.
Wow, that was a really well done and interesting video. It has been a while since I've found something this good!! Well done man!!
Very much appreciate it, finally putting my editing skills to use and glad people are enjoying it!
This is a truly heartbreaking and extremely sad video to watch, and for me personally it's especially relatable. I had stupid habits one or two years ago where I'd take an extremely random video or a photo or a voice recording of _absolutely anything_ that could've been taken, and that habit still partially lives on in me to this day, fortunately to a far lesser extent. It was all my subconscious fear of random good moments of life being lost and never recreated again which I desperately wanted to cling onto, not realizing that not *ABSOLUTELY* everything is worth saving, like mundane everyday stuff. And seeing that the same is happening to internet, and *way more important* stuff are being lost, is indeed very saddening to me as a sort of an information freak myself.
Also that last line about cringe was straight inspiring.
Another fascinating video essay well told. It's something we all kinda know as we spend more and more time in apps and platforms. It's not the internet that's dying. It's the web.. Which is sad, because the anarchic decentralized nature of the early internet was where anything could happen and we could put our own unique fingerprints on what did
Man, I feel this. There are lots of old Minecraft videos that I used to watch on UA-cam back in 2012 which are just... gone now. I still vividly remember the first Minecraft let's play that I followed (well, for a few episodes at least). I've spent tens of hours looking for it. Sometimes I feel like I have a trick that will help me track it down once again, but it never works. I think its just gone now, like so much from that era. So much content from UA-cam gets wiped, its really quite sad that the glory days of the website aren't even really around anymore.
Another banger, this guy's gonna blow up if he keeps making content like this!
I miss the golden age of the internet. No corperate agenda, basically nobody was a bot. Nothing was cencored or blocked from being searchable. It was extremely common to make a lifelong friend on a fandom website. Memes were just becoming a thing. I miss the internet i grew up with. We need to all heard together to bring it back
It's mostly definitely Musk. And had been mentioned the Internet Archive is absolutely in danger.
It's not musk, it's billionaires and investors that need to see profits grow and therefore by extension the current capitalist system
Had this pop up, and I had to watch. This is such an interesting concept to thing about with how the internet is slowly dying.
I'm 28, and the first memories of me personally using the internet are around 2004/2005 on forums for some video games I was into at the time (the Sims franchise was a big one), but I remember my mom using the internet on some freecycle sites a few years prior along with eBay. The change of the entire internet is insane, and trying to find some old sites and forum posts is harder to come by. Even with what you said about deceased people on FB, I know that I personally have at least 4 people (that I'm aware of) who have passed away.
There are few videos on the internet that have made me cry, but this is one of them
well, Gordon. It’s not “dying” per say? It’s that archival efforts are REALLY REALLY hard when it comes to something as big as the internet, and when someone dies or a website dies. Usually no one archives anything on these older websites, which leads to SO MUCH lost media. It’s like gotten to the point pseudo anthropologists have to pick up the slack, because I doubt any actual anthropology people have gotten the memo yet. And like it’s an actual mess, if you weren’t there in the 1990s? woof trying to find any old flash animations, small forums that haven’t been used since 1997, and other stuff. Is almost impossible, genuinely almost impossible. It’s really really hard and expansive job, and sometimes the websites are straight up deleted. And not even the wayback machine can help, so then you have to ask around for anyone or anything that survived the deletion. And like that’s a whole job in of itself, it’s a completely new form of anthropology that’s so varied and expanding that I genuinely think some of the stuff people grew up with is completely lost, gone, defunct, extinct. Like and the only things that remain are the memories of the people who used them last.
It’s this big problem, and when I mean big. I mean 100s of millions of websites and posts just gone, but I guess that’s just how it’s been for like 10+ years? Which isn’t helpful in anyway, but it’s something I guess.
I have a quote “TikTok, and honestly, most social media, have the same problem and exarcerbate. And I'm not even getting about how kids now have toys and clothing with the logo of TikTok, or Among Us or Fortnite... things that they don't even understand. They will form part of their memories later, and they'll wonder why, and their parents won't have a clear answer either. When you were a kid and had Mickey Mouse stuff at least you could tell "well, that's a cartoon". Mickey Mouse has a meaning. TikTok will vanish in a few years. What sense would it make then? None of these kids will have shared memories. None of those kids would have consumed things that had context. And because the nature of that cheap entertainment is by itself ephemeral, they won't ever make sense of it either. Much like myself trying to remember how my old childhood home was, except for your whole childhood. And teenage years. And if things go on, adulthood too. A whole life of nonsense.” -elbiotipo (on tumblr)
The whole post I’d very interesting, and I suggest you look them up. (I’d link the tumblr, but UA-cam HATES links.)
But they raise a very, very valid argument, these kids or teens or adults will live a life devoid of context.
And that’s why it’s so important to archive these old, creepy, Elsagate, gore edited, random nonsense, videos and websites.
It’s such a big deal, yet all we have so far are the passion of archivists.
It’s just a crazy situation, and I love learning about everything I can. From oral history (verbal history, word of mouth.) and it’s this intense jumble of horror and wonder, ever heard of kik? Yeah, it’s this crazy crazy world that’s on this web. And it’s all disappearing and reappearing at random intervals, and the stories I’ve heard are crazy. Are they true or not? I’m not one to judge when it comes to this, but it’s CRAZY.
It’s why I’m so passionate about it, it’s why I wrote so much. It’s a very interesting thing that is just so important.
Either way I hope you have a wonderful day!
I enjoyed your video!
I very much appreciate your comment and the passion you put into it. I agree that so much is being lost every single day, and I'm passionate about it too. Hence why I made the video, but it's hard to put into words and something I wanted to bring light to, and hopefully did! I do remember kik, I remember skype, friendster, Flash animations, so many old websites and resources on the internet that are just gone now or are faint memories that will blow away like dust in the wind.
I'm glad you liked the video and at least had somewhere to point your emotions and feelings, and could at least let out your feelings, frustrations, and tell someone about it. It means a lot that there are people out there that actually do care about all of this, and everything they can and will do to help preserve memories of times gone past.
I hope you have an amazing day yourself c:
The art of decentralization. Anyone can make a website, therefore things come and go, as anyone can make a website at any time and anyone can stop hosting their own website at any time. Though slowly over time the internet is being taken over by large tech companies and are a large part of the media we consume today, removing the magic the internet once had. Though, there is that magic still out there, somewhere. (in short, the internet has no limit, we create the internet, we dont create UNDER the internet, we create THE internet, theres no one in control of the internet, just the websites we visit or control ourselves)
Two of my friends from high school died last fall in a car accident (they got drunk, were speeding without seat belts, and didn't see the turn 5 miles out of town). Their accounts are still active, probably because their family doesn't have access to their passwords and don't know how to use one of the back door options to freeze their accounts. They still get linked all the time in posts and it is depressing to see what is basically a digital ghost pop up now and then.
Here's something even sadder: Dogs are not immortal.
;-; Take it back
@@gordoncenafa Half joke, half truth that things have a time limit to them. Not everything worthwhile survives, the ancient world's great libraries are a tale of woe.
Internet is a living, breathing system, of course things get lost to time. What's happening is completely normal.
Internet is not dying, its in constant state of renewal. Like how our bodies constantly replace "outdated" cells.
👏🙂
Great video.
I first realized this 10 or so years ago when half of my bookmarks lead to dead websites.
Quite unfortunate
I wouldn't describe the topic as "dark", you gave the true meaning of nostalgia. There is the pang of loss and old memories, or even regret. Then there is the feeling of realization of what happened in the past.
Recently, I’ve been interested in amateur manga translations from the 2000s. I know that sounds a bit weird, but seeing how different, and how similar, the culture surrounding these translation groups are to modern translation groups is really interesting. However, so far, I have ONLY found reuploaded chapters. Not a SINGLE website, blog or UA-cam channel from any of the old tl groups I have looked at still exist. It’s really strange. I wonder where those people are now, if they’re still translating, or if they’re still reading manga at all.
I can relate here. There used to be a translation of a manga I wanted to read, that was entirely translated in English. It’s gone now so I have to get it translated again.
As a website owner who cares about preservation, I regularly try to archive my own site and others I care about, especially if they announce they will shut down. With so many sites already gone, it makes it hard to find older content sometimes, like you mentioned. :(
I'm here before this gets a lot of views
Hear aswell
Here*
I used to have a website 😢. It was too expensive to maintain both the domain and the hosting. It was an art portfolio for my web design class. It wasn't anything crazy, but it was my own special place on the internet since it was truthfully my own made from scratch.
Did they make it more expensive over time?
I think the memorial thing on fb is interesting but at some point I'm sure facebook might not even exist anymore and they will be turned into dead links.
Also think it's interesting how like in some video game and stories they explore the idea that some sort of thing happens where they leave the old internet behind to make a new one whether that be from a cataclysm or just natural progression.
Imagine the entire internet just getting left behind for a successor and people going back to the old net to scour for information and for archeology projects to see what life was like from that time and before. The entire internet would be in term a dead net or a giant dead link.
But for that the old net would still need to exist, while current HDDs, SSDs, DVDs or whatever else don't survive even a century. So you need to constantly copy the whole 175ZB (that's 175 * 1024⁷ or roughly about 175 * 10²¹ bytes) of data expected to exist in 2025 to new storages for it to survive for any significant amount of time, or it will just rot in some basement until it's gone...
That's why the Internet Archie's CEO said that it's not true when people say "Once on the Internet, it's there forever".
The reality is, everything on the internet will disappear at some point. And it's even worse when we're talking about stuff hosted on private platforms, as those servers will be shutdown eventually and those services and content will be gone forever.
Some huge examples are Orkut, MySpace (which had huge data losses) and AOL hometown.
Luckily there's some AOL Hometown stuff on the internet archive, and there are Geocities and FortuneCity archives, but those will eventually disappear as well.
That's why I have a website that is easy to archive, when I go, and my website is gone, at least hopefully it'll be archived somewhere.
The internet is consolidating. And it's scary. User bases are grouping up, and the old sites that we used to use and love are falling out of use.
Archive what is important to you. Videos, images, websites, etc. Invest in a external hat drive that’s one or two Terabytes and stockpile it. I’ve got one and I’ve already got a good few folders stuffed with videos that are no longer available on UA-cam and that so far I haven’t found copies of elsewhere. Take it upon yourself to preserve your own little corner of the internet, it’s rewarding
The internet is moving away from standalone websites and more towards huge conglomerate websites. The internet of 2023 is getting boring. all the sites look the same. Everything is corporate. There is no more "bob's little corner on the web" website. You have a facebook/twitter/instagram that looks cookie cutter. I spend most of my time online on the same dozen sites, day after day.
The thought of the internet as a whole, becoming lost media, is a nightmare. I wish our data wasn't in the hands of corporations who didn't care about the responsibility of archiving literal history.
life is struggle
This is why supporting and adding to the internet archive is so important.
For the stupidest thing, I’ve remembered a video of a gory-like Mario style video game, but with hamburgers, and with 2 worlds that were grass plains (like SMW) and a giant, giant gray techno fortress, presumably underground. I also remember a clown as the boss, and he fought you while you hit him at points in a looping maze. It could be a dream, but I have a feeling that link rot might have taken it, or it was lost to UA-cam’s depths.
Super Chick Sisters
this is so real. I literally can't find some websites with neat articles that I read like 5 years ago while studying in uni
@@calamarits it's real
This is so dystopic. Imagine you and a friend using paid discord to save documents and old memes, pictures in like 2049 from the early 2010s and 20s.
I remember there was this doom fan's blog from the early 2000s about the history of doom bots, still up to this day as far as I remember.
Specifically what I remember was that it had links to other projects and maps related to the bots that are no longer accessable and I just felt really sad...
4:09
If we multiply the link rot rate per day which 0.02% by 365.2524 (Earth's Year) we get an annual link rot rate of around 7.3%, which means after only 8 years, most resources shared on social media on average for a College Study will be lost or harder to find.
Tell the corporations to take their damned fingers off its neck, and maybe they won't kill the goose that laid the golden egg...
Not stoned me at 5 in the morning absolutely dying at your Mac n cheese video wtf 💀🤣😭
that's absolutely hilarious 🤣do you know a link to this one by any chance?
Ya know, when I first saw this video in my recommended, I was like "what?" but now I understand. It's meant to be a happy ending, not some random guy talking nonsense like MatPat and FNAF. Instead, it's told to you calmly without talking down to you, explains examples of how this information is used and is useful, and introduces you to a term that not many people know about. Whenever people such as myself use the Wayback Machine to access these links, it's this sense of joy of looking into the past that can't fully be achieved in the modern age. It's like looking at a fossil in a museum: this thing has withstood the test of time itself, been recovered and people have put their heart and souls into protecting and preserving it. That's what's so beautiful about the internet.
its not just dyinmg its being erased. imm so glad ppl are starting to take note
as someone who loves visiting neocities sites, weird hobby blogs, using the wayback machine, & surfing to all the weird corners of the internet, I come across a lot of dead links. this video puts into words what i've been thinking about for a while now.
The twitter thing is actually heartbreaking. Theres a community based of the web show BFDI, the Object Show community. They have been searching for a lost show, that could be the first object show that came after BFDI. It evidence of its existence was only proven when someone found an old twitter account that shared the link to the video, which does not work.
So many discoveries and restoration of lost media could be lost when twitter or other platforms start deleting accounts with no way to archive them. Some things are definitely better off being lost but mostly, removing large parts of internet culture, even if niche, is quite harmful to their community and the internet in general
I am in that community and I was always intrigued by this show. I mean, its literally one of the most clear examples that ive ever seen of Link Rot. Just so many places that it could've been is just... Gone. I love object shows, its one of my special interests but having the 2nd object show to be lost is just disappointing to me.
The scary thing is though is that years from now, when everyone we knew from the internet is dead, the other generation won’t know about the people that’s on the internet. However those same videos will still be there. It’s sad and scary.
BTW this is actually a good video. You deserve more subs honestly.
Just imagine historians from 1 or 2 centuries ahead looking back today at the amount of information lost in digital media.
What i think is even more scary is the slow rot of driver sources. Like if you have an old PC with an old OS its becoming almost impossible to fully reinstall the old OS because the drivers are just gone from the internet. So the decay of online information can even influence hardware itself, because hardware without drivers are in many cases just useless.
I’m middle aged and this is not weird to me at all. I’ve seen so many types of media become irrelevant. Nobody has 8-track tapes, nobody has laser discs, records are just a collectible and kind of an oddity. I’m not sure why young people would expect anything online to be permanent? Nothing is permanent. And that’s why we need things like the Internet Archive to at least save what we can.
This is one of my biggest stresses in life, losing things that I value, out of my control, with no way to get them back…I can’t save everything
As someone else said. The internet isn't dying. It's forgetting.
Part of it is link rot. Another part is the fact that the things people used in the past are no longer compatible with modern browsers. An example is the cancelation of the SWF format. So many artist pages, gone. Simply because the page uses a file type that current browsers no longer read.
Well, at least some admins find a way to allow modern browsers to understand their sites.
It is forgetting, yes, but I really wanted to hammer home that the user base is dying and aging as well. If I called it forgetting, that would leave out the concept of the user base dying and vice versa. As well as making a title and thumbnail stand out more.
As for the way that the file formats are read that is absolutely true and something I couldn't quite fit into the script. It very much reminds me of television and movie archiving, and how film stock is still considered a great alternative to even some of the modern means, as all film requires is to be shown is light. No VCR, No computer that might not be able to read a specific file type, or a disc drive even.
Just some food for thought, thank you for the comment
I have an older version of firefox on my computer alongside my new one for this very reason.