The Internet Is Rotting (theatlantic.com) 106
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone. From a report: It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has "billions of books and no central filing system." Imagine if libraries didn't exist and there was only a "sharing economy" for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It's no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be -- especially if someone reported a book being in someone else's home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That's what we have right now on the web.
[...] People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary -- they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren't stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web -- the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks -- diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.
[...] People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary -- they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren't stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web -- the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks -- diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.
Oh my! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Netcraft confirms it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Oh my! (Score:1)
Well, depening on your definition of death, it already happened.
It's like temperature: How many Kelvin can be left for it to be dead for you? A signal/noise ratio of 0.1? 0.1E-6? 0.1E-12? ;)
For me, it is 401 Kelvin. (Leetspeak for "AOL", as in: Eternal September.)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I guessed that your link was going to point at the Jargon file equivalent of this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But usenet actually has died. It sort of still exists, but the current pulse is on the order of one beat per month.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think someone posted it recently, but I didn't click to check. Better as a 404?
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Forgetting is not necessarily bad (Score:2)
No, I just remember a time before the WWW. Somehow, knowledge managed to accumulate and be passed-on without it.
Apple and Oranges. Libraries store curated knowledge, not "all" information as some internet advocates imagine the internet should do.
The internet is forgetting some things. Forgetting is not necessarily bad, forgetting some things is also considered by some to be learning. One is bombarded with information, more successful individuals are better at selecting what to forget. Forgetting is part of the learning process.
Re: Forgetting is not necessarily bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Show me a site on the internet which does NOT curate knowledge. It doesn't exist, because any place which tries instantly piles up with illegal content and gets used as a free storage dump.
"Curate" in the library sense is not simply removing the illegal, there are also quality and importance considerations.
Re: (Score:2)
You have aphantasia, don't you?
That was a pretty cool movie, Wasn't it?
Re: (Score:2)
""Imagine if libraries didn't exist..." Why would I do that? Libraries have existed for *at least* 2600 years. They're still here. It's going to be okay."
Yes, in another 2600 years there will be a billion LitRPG books and no science books and all the links point to Nirvana.
Re: (Score:2)
Libraries have existed for *at least* 2600 years.
But they end up containing prayer books instead of important scientific works [wikipedia.org]. Convince me that librarians don't have their own political/social agendas. Or just ignorance.
What a load of BS. (Score:5, Insightful)
The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone...
Stop with the histrionics. Link rot is part of the internet. Rot is part of any system. Systems grow around them or fall (and something else take their place.) This is just bullshit first-world-problems seeking for attention.
Re:What a load of BS. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's The Atlantic. Histrionics is what they do.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the real story is someone was able to write over 6,000 words about link rot. Either The Atlantic really needed to fill some space, or they need a new editor.
TFA talks about other related things, like how things are more malleable in the digital age. For example, I thought this was interesting about how an e-book version of "War and Peace" had every instance of the word "kindle" changed to "nook":
Ebooks don’t have those limitations, both because of how readily new editions can be created and how simple it is to push “updates” to existing editions after the fact. Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:
As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern ” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.
For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern ”
A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use.
Re: (Score:2)
TFA talks about other related things, like how things are more malleable in the digital age.
Honestly, I never made it that far. After the third anecdote about link rot, I was done. I quickly scrolled through the rest looking for anything interesting. I must have missed the section on Ebooks.
I'm just not a fan of the author's writing style, and I couldn't push through it any longer.
Re: What a load of BS. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think you read the article. Did you get to the part about digital subscriptions instead of hard copy periodicals? Or the part where authors change the content of digital books without the purchasers' ever knowing?
Re: What a load of BS. (Score:4, Funny)
"I don't think you read the article."
You must be new here. welcome!
Re: (Score:2)
And sometimes we know and welcome the change. e.g. writer hires an editor.
Re: What a load of BS. (Score:2)
Offline copy of book ("bookz", if it has to be) with a 128 bit checksum written on paper. This is not only dishonest, but it's also gaslighting for content providers to alter books this way.
Re:What a load of BS. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a real problem when so many people get knowledge from Wikipedia and you go to read the sources and none of them work anymore.
Re:What a load of BS. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it would work better if Wikipedia made all their links run through the internet archive. That way they would have a link that doesn't rot, as the information is backed up. They could even point to a specific version of the article, so that later changes don't cause the information to be invalid.
I suppose that would take some more funding for the internet archive, but perhaps the cooperation would make both of them better for it.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if it would work better if Wikipedia made all their links run through the internet archive.
Aren’t they already doing that? They’ve had a partnership since 2016, with the IA archiving outbound links and then fixing them when/if they break.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/201... [wikimedia.org]
Re: (Score:1)
It's a real problem when so many people get knowledge from Wikipedia and you go to read the sources and none of them work anymore.
That's because the original source was probably BS to begin with. They don't listen to experts and listen to idiots. I've seen many world experts just say FU to them because they're too stupid to accept the help of some of the best people in the world that know what they're talking about. It's like a leftist click.
Re: (Score:2)
The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone...
Stop with the histrionics. Link rot is part of the internet. Rot is part of any system. Systems grow around them or fall (and something else take their place.) This is just bullshit first-world-problems seeking for attention.
People just thought the intertoobz was something different than it actually was. Of course links go away. Of course it is trivial to change documents.
People just tried to bend it to what they thought it should be. And they all found out that it bends to no one. The internet simply reflects humanity.
Re: (Score:2)
Systems grow around them
Exactly.
That miss on the author's part, along with the absurd library analogy, turns this whole thing into an eye roll. Yeah, if a physical book was lost in some guy's house that is a shame. This is the internet, where everyone who wanted one got their own actual copy of the book for $0 marginal cost, so if Bob lost his under his couch no one other than Bob was impacted.
And assuming Bob has a bittorrent client, he doesn't even have to bother looking under his couch.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't about books. This isn't about copies, this certainly isn't about marginal costs, and this isn't solved with a bittorrent client. You missed the plot completely.
The library analogy is precisely that the internet has no capable equivalent. If I give you book or magazine name, article title, page number, date published, etc, that citation is a stable reference to an identifiable and (relatively) immutable physical body of work that can be located (relatively) easily.
Maybe the local library has a cop
Re: (Score:3)
Easy to call other's problems first-world, but will you speak so glibly when your favorite porn site goes down?
Re: What a load of BS. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
100 years ago most of the humans on the planet had three major worries that exceeded any other of their worries by at least an order of magnitude: 1)worrying about gathering and hunting enough food so they don't go hungry or worse, starve 2)hoping the untreated water they drink doesn't give them explosive dysentery, and 3) having a warm dry safe place to sleep for the night.
Today in 2021, people without real problems of the past, can write an article about broken web links as if it is one of the largest p
Well that is a relief! I was thinking (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Well that is a relief! I was thinking (Score:1)
That actually has a scientific name. Historian call it the "digital dark ages". They started with the invention of "copyright". (Well-intentioned. Badly executed, to say the least. Severly outdated since the Internet became public.)
Only one copy of data is fragile (Score:2)
maybe I was the only one seeing information getting harder to find under the massive pile of obsolete, old and just junk info on today's commercialized web. And we have not even gotten to the massive stinking piles of advertising being pushed out on the internet.
Which is why forgetting can be an important part of learning. The problem is selecting what to remember and what to forget.
Of course having to replicate data in order to share it does have its advantages due to redundancy. With only one copy of the data and sharing being done by links we do have some fragility. Sort of a poor backup policy problem.
Re: (Score:2)
maybe I was the only one seeing information getting harder to find under the massive pile of obsolete, old and just junk info
Maybe you are. I for one think it's too hard to find old and obsolete info when you need it. Just because it's old and obsolete doesn't mean it's not valuable. History often helps with the context of today's discussion.
And today's discussion is polluted with 1000 clones of each other. Seriously a current story tends to produce search results of an echo chamber literally all saying the same stuff in some cases verbatim and even worse linking to each other in a circular fashion as a citation. If they make a c
Facts on the internet HA HA (Score:2)
they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts
Same (Score:3)
It's simply a fact of existence that information is lost over time. Do any amount of genealogical research and you'll quickly realize how often "records lost in a fire" crops up. Servers going offline is simply another version of that. And even if a website goes offline if it was a truly popular site you'll find often times that someone has archived it.
Yes, despite digital copying being prevalent, in 500 years every single forum conversation we ever had will not likely be available. This very comment I'm typing will not likely be stored anywhere, but the amount of information that IS still available will likely dwarf what we've been able to piece together from any prior time in history.
Backing up using page ranking ? (Score:3)
It's simply a fact of existence that information is lost over time.
Yes, but pre-www sharing involved replication. Post-www sharing heavily relied on linking. Perhaps making data more vulnerable due to the sort of occasional natural or human disasters you refer to.
Think of it as a backup problem. Perhaps there needs to be some effort to automatically back up things using something analogous to the original Google page rank algorithm. Lots of links to information, it gets backed up. OK, maybe some selectivity is needed to separate the scientific data from the advertisemen
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
you'll quickly realize how often "records lost in a fire" crops up
Very common for African American and Palestinian property records.
Ummm...What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummm...What? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is organizing it. Why would someone be in charge of that?
Google is organizing it. They do it for ad revenue.
Re: (Score:2)
Google and search engines in general do not do that. They examine a huge pile of text and find matches.
Re: (Score:2)
They examine a huge pile of text and find matches.
And how do you think they do that? Do you think they inspect every webpage on the internet, randomly, every time you search?
Re: (Score:2)
No, not every time you search. They do it ahead of time and write the results down. It's called an index.
Re: (Score:2)
"Humanity's Knowledge" ?! EFF ORF ! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is more humanity's drool than its knowledge.
Re: "Humanity's Knowledge" ?! EFF ORF ! (Score:1)
The knowlegde is in there. It's just buried in an ocean of drool, and when you reach it, you notce it is badly explained.
(Case in point: Try finding a video on YouTube, that *actually* explains how magnets work. You can tell, when they are mentioning spin and relativistic effects.)
We need a web portal for "distillers". But not like Wikipedia, but with strict structuring into semantic graphs. That would be a game changer. (There would be a tool that displays it in an easy way for everyone.)
Re: "Humanity's Knowledge" ?! EFF ORF ! (Score:1)
It's amusing that everyone acts like Libraries don't have a presence on the net. A presence that includes myriad reference materials.
Internet != Knowledge (Score:2)
Any reliable, curated, objective sources of information will remain accessible or otherwise archived. It should be acknowledged that this composes a very tiny percentage of the Internet as a whole.
All the rest of the Internet is memes, blogs and social media which get buried and crushed under their own weight. Humanity will not miss them if they aren't preserved.
Re: Internet != Knowledge (Score:1)
"Objective" is a weasel word though. It implies a popsci view of science, where reality is assumed to be absolute. Which just isn't the case, and even if it was, it would be unobtainable for a human anyway, as we have known for at least a 100 years. Not with our neural nets that only works by detecting patterns via biasing input based on past input. Not with our model of reality having to be mostly hearsay out of sheer necessity (time constraints) anyway. Not with reality being realtive anyway.
Your intentio
Re: (Score:2)
That's fair. I tend to use the word "objective" to mean "unattached to any bias or agenda" which isn't accurate.
The Internet Is A Weed (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the human mind's features is selective forgetfulness. If we remember every detail of our existence, we would become overloaded with useless information. The Internet needs the same thing and what we are seeing is a natural consequence of its usage.
What we are seeing on the internet is content being "forgotten" because nobody deems it useful to maintain or access. Is this really a bad thing? Should browsers disable broken links and search engines deprecate useless pages?
Re: (Score:2)
I see your point, but I would say that the internet is a beautiful, wonderful wildflower; rather than calling it a weed.
Re: (Score:2)
What we are seeing on the internet is content being "forgotten" because nobody deems it useful to maintain or access.
And also so that they can patent it all over again. There is a lot of stuff out there that people are taking (or given) credit for 'on the Internet' that isn't their original creation.
Anecdote: A bunch of us were sitting around discussing the origins of certain phrases or quotes. Specifically when and in which movies they first appeared in. One of my favorites "Come in, Rangoon" returns the answer of "Beyond Rangoon", released in 1995*. Except that I can vaguely recall having seen it, and used it when I wa
Re: (Score:2)
What we are seeing on the internet is content being "forgotten" because nobody deems it useful to maintain or access.
No, it's being forgotten because the person who published the information no longer sees value in keeping it up (regardless of what possible consumers of that information, now or in the future, think). Or because a company reorganizes its website and is too obsessed with new-and-shiny to care about the old customer support forum which contained the kind of information only a few customers would need in a year, but which will take days to rediscover now that the forum post that summarized the solution has be
of course it's rotting (Score:3)
Haha, computer based things have the shortest lifespan of all for retaining information. Most the information that was on say 1970s computers is lost forever. No surprise info on the internet would undergo same fate, and we have the added hilarity of young people revising information in places such as Wikipedia for politicial correctness, virtual signalling, social agenda... or not allowing articles at all because they couldn't find internet article on it rather than getting their ass to libraries. What a farce.
The situation in other realms is some better but not as good as people imagine.
Even acid free paper will only last 200 years under normal conditions, that 1000 year claim is for special expensive storage where the AC will last 1000 years (hint, in much less time than that it's gonna be fucked)
Your really old books and documents aren't on paper at all, ink on vellum (the real stuff, skin of calf) might last more than that in a cave in the middle east or Mediterranean monastery, but we normally don't use that now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Haha, computer based things have the shortest lifespan of all for retaining information. Most the information that was on say 1970s computers is lost forever. No surprise info on the internet would undergo same fate, and we have the added hilarity of young people revising information in places such as Wikipedia for politicial correctness, virtual signalling, social agenda
That's getting a little harder to do, fortunately.
Your really old books and documents aren't on paper at all, ink on vellum (the real stuff, skin of calf) might last more than that in a cave in the middle east or Mediterranean monastery, but we normally don't use that now.
While looking at ways to archive materials, it was difficult to come to any other conclusion than yours. In fact, we had to come up with "active archiving", which is a royal PITA, because you just don't archive something once, you continue re-archiving the same material over time.
The closest thing to "permanent" digital archiving we have is actual punched holes in huge reels of acid free paper tape, printed and read on a machine that is simply constructed,
Re: (Score:1)
That's getting a little harder to do, fortunately
How has it been getting harder? Did they enact new policies?
Re: (Score:2)
That's getting a little harder to do, fortunately
How has it been getting harder? Did they enact new policies?
Wikipedia has editing tools and guidelines that deal pretty well with what they call "vandals" and Drama Queens, and if you go in there to post stupid woke stuff, thay can revert it back pretty quickl
Re: (Score:2)
oh the "word processors" of the 1950 and 1960s had those paper punch tapes, my mom at a school worked one, being fed pairs of tapes, one of letters or records, another of names and addresses.
You couldn't even store 1Mbyte of information on a single tape though, too unwieldy to carry and prevent breakage when using.
The tape won't last if it's not cared for properly though, it's making an assumption the air condition will work for decades or centuries. Just as your active archiving always assumes someone wil
Re: (Score:2)
Haha, computer based things have the shortest lifespan of all for retaining information.
That's why I use Jordanian Salt Cave LLC to back up all my important data to papyrus. "The magic is in the jars."
Duh (Score:2)
Links come and links go. Welcome to the web. Reminds me of when I was cleaning out my old HS papers when moving out after graduating college. Found my senior research paper with three 4-year-old links. None of them worked anymore. That was back in 2003.
This makes me reminisce about my first webpage I made in college, which included the perfunctory "Links Page" that's all but died from the modern internet. Of all the links I had to corners of the internet I thought were cool back then, one still surviv
Links were meant to be two-way. (Score:1)
This is exactly why.
Also, PROTIP from Slashdot to The Atlantic: The web is not the Internet. Nowadays, it's just that part of the Internet where we herd those that still print out the Internet or use iPads. ... Like you. ;)
I'm already working on something better though, so I just treat it as a lost cause.
Re: (Score:2)
Social platforms are speeding the rot (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, don't blame the game but the player. But you can play too. Create a bunch of sock puppet accounts, find a target, peruse their posting history and find stuff that you can label as "hate speech". Have all your sock puppets complain and get that person kicked.
With some effort you can take over social media platformss that way.
Re: (Score:2)
Mod this up! I'd do it, but Slashdot won't give me any more points.
rotten.com (Score:2)
We have the technology (Score:3)
IPFS [ipfs.io], Arweave [arweave.org], and other projects are being used to build the permaweb. The Atlantic writes 6k words about link rot, but somehow failed to Google around for possible solutions.
Re: (Score:2)
IPFS, Arweave, and other projects are being used to build the permaweb. The Atlantic writes 6k words about link rot, but somehow failed to Google around for possible solutions.
IPFS is unfortunately no real solution as it does not provide for automated data replication. Arweave might be more popular if it didn't depend on Erlang23.
Digital Fahrenheit 451 (Score:2)
But some of it is very much intentional.
If corporations don't want you having something digital, or knowing something, they can easily make it disappear off the Internet.
That is the real problem with so many things being in 'The Cloud', everything being on 'streaming services', and being herded away from buying physical media like CDs, DVDs, Bluray, and even printed books.
Some of you have experienced this already with 'e-books': you don't actuall
Re: (Score:2)
In the near future, owning physical things will become prohibitively expensive due to the collapse of trading with China. We're approaching an end of an era of cheap stuff packed into wally world, and back to the pre-20th century standard where the average person in the middle class has only a few precious personal possessions.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The internet is not a library, it's a living ocean (Score:1)
Link rot, oh well (Score:2)
Wayback machine (Score:2)
My brother has a folder on his computer called OldComputr. This has an image of the disk on his previous computer. That has an image of the disk of the computer before that. all they way back to the first computer he owned, and then it contained files from other computers. As long as storage gets cheaper per byte this is likely to continue.
In https://web.archive.org/ [archive.org] there lies the Wayback machine. This does not archive everything. It does not archive everything that people push at it, so their version c
The internet is rotting! (Score:2)
Hyperlinks are not broken. (Score:2)
"Link rot" is not due to the architecture of the Internet. It's because at some point, people don't want to pay their hosting fees anymore. As the Internet has become more commercialized and profit-focused, things may disappear a bit faster than they did in the past than when universities were in charge. That's... just the way things are.
It's sad how many people believe that cloud centralization or that reworking the usability of a web browser URL bar will fix all this. You can't force people to host th
Re: Hyperlinks are not broken. (Score:1)
University accounts weren't immune from this. All our student accounts were wiped when we graduated. Stuff was lost.
Re: (Score:2)
For students, yes, but I regularly still see articles written by professors that are 30 years old.
We remember Harambe (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the few times this rant is actually on topic...good on you.