This is like the disinvention of the printing press, at least from an archeological perspective.
Poorly thought-out Facebook posts are forever; coverage of city council malfeasance from two years ago, not so much.
This isn’t helped by most websites reinventing themselves every couple of years so the old links 404 even though the content still exists.
If anyone is considering how to avoid this on their own site: https://indieweb.org/URL_design
I think much of Geocities remained accessible until 2013/2014 before going completely (apart from Japan 2019 or so).
I wonder how much of this stuff may still be around on harddrives somewhere. Random blogs probably not because they were using shared hosting that would overwrite and reuse the space when the blog went down, and typically destroy the drives when the servers got decomissioned. But maybe large platforms like Geocities might still be archived somewhere.
If the information was important wouldn’t it already be passed around and expanded upon? The Internet is probably 99% junk, at least the posts I’ve made. Only the good stuff like goatse survives.
Problem is, people rarely realize the importance until they’re lost. Plenty of posts from 90s and 2000s containing valuable insights are probably lost forever. Remember that not everything online is in English, either.
This is even more concerning (or funny, depending on how dark your humour is) when you realise that it will be replaced by AI-generated webpages. Humanity’s presence on the internet is disappearing before our eyes.
Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
And also with less of the whole “they’re doing this to manipulate people into believing…things” and more “people want quick and superficial information so that’s all that’s being produced and since it’s easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that’s all the internet will be.” The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.
I think the Wikipedia article needs to be updated to be honest. Continuing to describe it as a “conspiracy theory” is quite misleading given the phenomenon is already underway and only picking up pace.
And now with Google regurgitating a summary of the content they’ve crawled there will be no incentive to publish because no one will click through to get ad payments.
