The Internet is Slowly Dying

This is a much deeper video about a topic I don't think many people know about, how basically the internet is slowly crumbling and dying around us. (Fun times!) Thank you all so much for watching, and the immense support on the last video, I hope you all enjoy this one just as much, even if it's not about something as funny, or has a plot twist halfway through, as far as I know at least.

0:00 Intro
0:23 There's a website...
1:38 Look beneath the site
2:28 Studies show
3:32 Link rot
5:41 The users
7:00 Hope
8:10 sorry to interrupt
9:12 Regularly scheduled content
10:00 Applebee's
10:15 Outro

In this video I discuss the loss of information, the power of links, the degradation of the internet and it's data, Link Rot, the amount of people on the internet that die and how Twitter has just implemented new terms and policies to remove accounts that haven't been active in 30 days. If you are looking for any sources for this video, they are all below:

#Internet #InternetDying #Rot #Link #LinkRot #lost #lostmedia #Milliondollarhomepage #information #google #inactive #accounts

[gordoncenafa]

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.

[FolstrimHori]

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.

[Fayanora]

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.

[themaccer]

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.

[snazzydrew]

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 naive.

[smileyp]

Internet archiving is going to become a genuine form of -palientalogy- anthropology/archeology

[smincesmeat]

It always sucks whenever I find myself on forum posts from 10, 15, 20 years ago and have to say to myself ‘wow, I wish I knew what they were looking at.’ Hell, even stuff from just 5 years ago often has its images replaced with a frowny face and a tiny url logo.

For example, trying to find good info on older games often yields few, if any, forum posts. For more popular games, the number of contemporary threads are maybe 2 or 3. I’m sure less people using the internet probably contributed to that, but it’s pretty obvious that link rot’s come into play when the posters link to websites that haven’t existed since the Bush era.

[Pa_amb_tomaquet]

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.

[rebane]

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 YouTube 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.

[MoonsOrca]

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!

[robertutley]

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.

[fivethousandshoes]

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.

[pieguy]

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.

[ThatFlamingFroggo]

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.

[nicolelasher]

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.

[drpill]

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

[shannonolivas]

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.

[CoyoteSeven]

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.

[TheBcoolGuy]

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.

[TuMadre]

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