Hosting sites costs money.
Sometimes, people run out of money.
Sometimes, money runs out of people (ie people die).
My personal site was always just for me and my friends, but when it became too costly of an endeavor to keep hosting, I let it go.
A small business that goes completely out of business doesn’t need their website to exist 10 years later, now do they?
This isn’t just personal sites. Large blogs (Gawker), whole news sites (Vice), and other content no longer exist, because cynical corporate parasites bought them out. Newspapers that exist from before the internet era are arguably better archived on microfilm, Google Books etc, than today’s news. The Internet Archive and other sites exist, but they are nonprofit and can’t keep up with the sheer scale of content being pulled down. Also strongly disagree with your assertion that some sites don’t need to be saved. The whole point of archiving is that we often can’t judge what is important to future generations
I understand all that, but I can almost positively assure you that my shitposting isn’t super important to have saved, other than for personal reasons. I have a backup of my site from the time, I’ve held onto it, for sure. But after I die, I’d really rather it stop existing, just like I do.
And we really don’t need to remember every business that started and failed within two years. I certainly don’t see a great reason to document my dad’s shitty used car salesman antics of my youth with his own business. It’s honestly also best forgotten by time. There’s more worthwhile and prolific con-men to write about and keep documentation thereof.
And frankly, if I don’t want my past to be on the internet forever, that should be my choice. Just like in the past, pre-internet-and-computers, if I didn’t want to share my writings with anyone before I died, I could burn them properly to make sure they were lost to time.
My original intent was literally meant as a Devil’s Advocate counter-point to the point of the article. Sure, we can’t tell from where we sit what’s important to the future… so maybe trying to save everything is a fools errand to begin with, since we don’t know what’s worthwhile to save? Saving literally everything for the sake of the future seems ill-considered. Once again, I assure you my shitposting with my friends really isn’t all that important culturally or socially.
EDIT: Also this is a cute philosophical 180 degree turn from 14 years ago when numerous scientists, philosophers, and organizations were positively up-in-arms and scared about the prospect of the internet meaning “the end of forgetting” and not being able to move on from your past and grow as a person because your past life on the internet would always come back to haunt you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html
Previously, we panicked because everything was going to be online forever!!! Ohhh spooky, dangerous!!
Now, we’re panicked because nothing is going to be online forever!!! Ohhh toospooky, dangerous!!
Oh, humans, never stop humaning.
I’ve felt much the same way for decades. I am very grateful that all the stupid shit I thought, did, or said as a young person wasn’t preserved by some omnipresent archival machine. Some moments are best lost to the winds of time. People who grew up with the internet and social media don’t know what life was like before. I’m not a “good old days” kind of guy, but I do think the archive-everything-forever compulsion does vast amounts of harm.
The real issue is that we seem to be purging all the wrong things.
Useful answer to technical question? Gone five years later.
Unfounded and fraudulent accusation that some teenager in Albuquerque committed a hideous crime? Preserved for the ages. Revenge porn photos? Also preserved, although possibly without the attributions.
Although, really, all of that is human nature too: we conserve what draws the attention of the average mook, not what specialists find useful.
For over 15 years, I oversaw the technical aspect of the biggest weblog in my country. I took great professional pride in making sure that every time we migrated to a new cms, links would keep on working, even when the external pages they linked to were since long dead.
A couple of years ago I left. Last year they changed cms once more. Now all the links are dead, and can best be found through through archive. The content was ported to the new cms, but the links weren’t. So even though the content is in the database, it’s just inaccessible by its old url.
Such a shame.
Yeah, that’s the internet for you. Anything you want to stay around will vanish someday, and anything you want gone will be here forever.
Shout-out to Archive.org for all the awesome work they do to backup what they can from the internet.
(Especially when some stack overflow answer to a question is just a link to some website that has either changed or no longer exists).
I learned this a while ago: If you find something interesting save it localy.
