The internet Archiv Probably still has it and fuck them wanting to appeal to fucking Google search.
However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance
From the article, CNET is archiving it on Wayback themselves.
It’s fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they’re archiving the articles before taking them down.
To address the headline, though, I don’t think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we’ve been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.
It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it’d been shared a few times.
Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I’m much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.
However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance.
People are freaking out so bad about this story. They’re doing the right thing and archiving it before deletion. Settle down.
How many CNET articles from 2004 are you reading that you’re getting this angry about it?
Storage and bandwidth have never been cheaper. If you’re not doing some grand replacement of the CMS, it’s less effort NOT to remove old content.
I love the argument they’re trying to make: if they prune enough content, everything looks fresh and new. So you’re effectively discarding one of the most valuable assets you have-- the fact you’ve been doing the same thing for 25 years and have some established credibility-- for a perception of “fast” that could be imitated by any number of content mills or AI services.
If you’re looking at a review of a RTX 4090, it says a lot when the same site also scored the Radeon VII, Geforce 3 Ti, and S3 Savage.
Money ruins everything.
All of the geocities websites I used to go to proved that the internet wasn’t forever. Did anyone really think it was?
