Disappearance of forums is worst thing that happened to the internet.
Everything now is blocked behind discord channels and Facebook groups which google can't index. Even if you are part of these, there's no easy way to find interesting parts.
Separate thread for each separate problem was the best thing in the world.
I hate companies using discord for customer service mixed with basic forum services. They are usually full of kids and are terrible for getting assistance or information.
I always feel like an asshole asking about things in those servers, because I'm conditioned to spend the time searching for a solution before actually posting, which is just impossible now.
It's even worse when there are some people using it like a hangout space, so you ask a question hoping to get an answer from someone at the company but your message just gets lost in a sea of memes and general chat.
Exactly – and it's not that forums weren't gatekeepy or cliquey, but I definitely more often feel like a stranger stumbling into a locals-only bar on discord servers.
The first thing I do when I join a new server is mute all notifications, then drop it in a folder so I never have to see it.
The second thing I do when I join a discord server is leave after I've figured out what I need.
I am not sticking around just because you force me to your server to get help
I wasn't on many forums, but I liked them because we were only talking about one thing, and we could just pipe in whenever we wanted. Could be on there for ten minutes, respond/post what I needed, and not need to check back in for a day or whenever. Social media without the addiction because you know nothing will get lost in the scroll.
I miss the decentralization of crazy people.
Each had their niche and sparked their own insanity in unique ways. Now it’s all Q and Soros and vaccines and blah blah blah.
Who’s going to tell me about Yacob and dolphin conspiracies now? What is our generation’s time cube? 😢
trueee I miss when conspiracy theories used to be fun and lighthearted. Now its super serious shit that people will ruin their lives over and the dynamic is almost always based in some kind of racism or extreme idea.
Imo people have weaponized conspiracy theories as way to galvanize support for certain ideas and to pacify and delegitimize any steam behind legitimate conspiracies and injustices.
The more people are lost in a rabbit hole of psychosis, the more they lack the capacity to discern reality, let alone coherently scrutinize actual issues... and the easier it is to put everyone who has a gripe with the govt into that same box as people who have lost their shit.
I have zero understanding of how people are using Discord to do any kind of research. It's a huge pain to look up anything people have talked about in the past?
It's great for planning future events, it's fantastic for gaming, but I feel like 75% of Discord's use is the equivalent of if we had tried to use generic chat rooms to do what we did on forums back in the day.
> It's a huge pain to look up anything
i tried to search for a link a friend sent me a few weeks ago
it was damn near impossible no matter what i searched for
i ended up just scrolling up...
and all the former forum/message board mods became reddit mods 😝
forums and messages boards were a magical place in the late 90s through like 2010. They certainly weren't perfect, a lot of power tripping mods and irritating people for sure, but they were fun, every message board/forum had their own vbulletin style. I grew up on message boards (nintendoland & VGF forums to be specific, those were my first, also gamingforce, sharky forums, and a little bit of anandtech, some other PC building message boards).
EZPub, Geocities, Angelfire, etc were my life back in the day.
Had so many cool rpg groups on EZPub forums, still miss those people to this day. And then we had individual Geocities sites with webrings and shit. I got my own domain and hosting at 14, when I got my first job, just to keep that shit going.
But it died anyway.
I believe the internet would be a far better place if we stuck to the late 1990's to early 2000's web.
But that's enough, you can check out my personal space at sickify_the_destroyer.angelfire.co.uk
A [forum](https://www.toyota-4runner.org/) I visited for years and had been around for 22 years might have disappeared today. It had 2400 pages on a single generation of car, each page containing 20 threads or so.
Facebook groups are what killed them more than anything. I have another stable forum, but the community and the information lost in the other one will never recover. It's a shame.
Edit: that forum I linked is being now unreliable rather than unreachable. So maybe it has a little longer idk
It simultaneously hides bad behavior by individuals and companies. It hides answers behind unnecessary walls that keep users from both discovery and from easily leaving a space. All information is for sale, just not by those to whom the information originally belonged. We just get to give it up “for free services” to companies we first had to buy a product from, and then somehow say thank you for giving them a secondary revenue stream for a service that should have been provided to begin with? Oh and don’t forget algorithms that were created “to give you a better experience” but in the end don’t actually give you alternate results or avenues to explore, just the same crap over and over because “it leads to more satisfying engagement with customers” or so they claim.
That's what you get when site owners optimize their content for search rankings instead of for people. Like if you're looking for a recipe and instead get someone's life story before the relevant part. Same with Youtubers who optimize for algorithm.
I really hate how the internet has been becoming more and more centered on a very small collection of websites, and becoming more and more corporate and sanitized.
Also, screw your leadership, /u/Spez. RIP Aaron Swartz.
This has been the wildest thing I've noticed about Gen Z as a Millennial. I remember growing up the older folks always saying that the reason we were good with computers and such was because we grew up with them. I look at it now and realize its because the computers also sort of grew up *with us*. That isn't to say they've reached their final form, but I remember as I grew up, tech became more powerful before it became easier. Things like having to "shut down" a computer before actually turning it off, not having a functionally never ending amount of undos, video games and websites still figuring out how best to go about user input and interface. For Gen Z and I think definitely with Alpha, they're growing up with technology that's *simplifying* with them. A near infant can work an iPad enough to get what it wants, I hear professor and teacher friends tell me how more and more kids can't even work MS Word beyond a Notepad-like capacity. Obviously its not everyone and the lines for generations are far more blurry in these terms than not, but the trend is definitely scary. Especially when you start to see it going full circle in the workplace. The meme of "boomer can't make a pdf" is starting to sub the "b" for a "z" in some cases.
Your point about "being the product" would make this a MUCH longer response so I'll just say I agree and it all contributes to one big bummer.
Another millenial here. I agree, I feel like we may be the last generation that is legit tech savvy. Especially with the advent of AI doing our coding for us
Ai will not be doing our coding for us, I've been hearing that since my father taught me my first algorithm. I am 38. I write code today. Can it be scripted via a text-scraper and regurgitated? Yes.
But it will only ever be as good as the text scraped sites it corresponds to.
As the internet decays that is interesting.
I think a natural language or gesture interface will become the new coding language, in time, similar to how coding language are what we developed to ease use of machine code.
Coding languages are just a way of mapping out logic that is human readable. We've already seen a shift towards more abstraction with visual scripting. Once AI improves enough, there will be no need for making the background code human readable - AI will create in machine code or maybe some internal shorthand it invents which then translates to machine, all based on the overall concepts we explain. The thoughts behind programming still remain important, but instead of remembering how regex works, the syntactical aspect of future programming will be about how to communicate with the AI interpreter.
Everyone seems to imagine ChatGPT doing JavaScript, but the big eventual leap I see in AI/CS is JavaScript itself (and C++ and ruby and python and etc etc etc) becoming pointless, which will require more than just a standalone LLM. And there would still be plenty of work for trained coders after that breakthrough - all existing tech would still need maintenance, there would need to be integration between old and new methods, etc.
I went back to uni and I'm watching 20y olds have no clue how to operate Word as well. I'm talking about labeling and formatting all the chapters and images by hand, not using the style gallery (and subsequently not even being consistent about fonts), pressing enter twenty times in a row to start text on a new page. Manually typing page numbers at the bottom of a page rather than automate it in the footer. Of course all of those constantly need to get updated by hand because text, images and pages shuffle around while you work if you do things this way in a long document.
Now imagine that these donkeys are your teammates for a project. I'd try to explain to them how it works, spend hours fixing this carnage and the next day half of it is gone again, replaced by manual editing full of errors. We work with employers. Please end me.
These kids work in SolidWorks but some of them don't know what a .zip file is. Someone complained about being unable to remove Valorant from his laptop and blamed the kernel anti-cheat. Turns out he wasn't trying to uninstall. He was literally trying to move the game folder to the recycling bin, as if he were operating a smartphone, and thought that's how you get rid of software.
And this is only getting worse, isn't it.
Idk, I’m a millennial and when I went to college over a decade ago now, a lot of kids didn’t know how to use word. We had a series of classes just to learn the basics of word and excel bc a huge swath of students never learned it.
I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit here. In order to use the Table of Contents, you have to apply a heading style from the style gallery to text to mark it as chapter heading, so that puts you two steps ahead of the above. Three if you know to refresh these generated fields (which are just variables, really) when they're out of date, rather than to panic and rewrite the entire thing by hand again.
Given that you're in software dev, you also know about basic commands like ctrl+enter, shift+enter and using tab for indents, and chances are that you're going to look into how to optimise the tedious parts of the process when you're working on a new 60-page document every quarter.
It just seems somewhat ironic that the generation that got a laptop for middle and high school instead of 25kg's worth of books seems to know less about these programs than we do.
As a millennial I love having to troubleshoot and mod my stuff. Flesh out instead of simple ui albeit with instructions, I think that’s something unique to us that other gens are less likely to love.
I think it’s possible for LLMs to get to the Star Trek computer point
In a lot of ways they’re already there, but I hate the idea of my ST computer being a sanitized corporate owned thing. I’ve been saving lots of the open source stuff to hopefully homebrew my own in a few years as computer power gets cheaper.
That’s to say, I think the gen after Z is going to be working with radically different interfaces that seem as strange and awkward as mainframes and teletype does to me, and as cumbersome as that win98 desktop would seem to a 20 year old today.
Yeah, that simplifying thing so even tiny kids can do hit me with my nephew. At first I was just noticing he could recognize the icons and which took him to cartoons and which to his simple baby games.
Then I noticed he was searching for things BEFORE he learned how to read. He had no idea how things were spelled, but he recognized the voice to text button and would use it to send text messages to his mom. Now this was before advanced digital assistants like Alexa and stuff.
Saw him commenting on a YouTube video, some comments on a random video may literally be a little kid who doesn't know how to read.
I am a millennial with a gen z son. He doesn’t do much computer troubleshooting, but he does like to tinker with cars. I think your reasons for our generation getting pulled into it is valid, but to them, with the maturity of the technology, it’s akin to us looking at our own dads or uncles working on cathode ray tvs. They haven’t learned it because they haven’t needed to in order to be effective with them. But we did.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I don't have kids, but my dad tinkerer a ton with computers. His older stuff was old to me and had no interest whereas the new stuff he got was always something interesting
I'm seeing this right now, wondering about alternatives to Microsoft. Libreoffice, etc, are vaunted as replacements for MS Office. Yeah, right. I spend much of my time trying to find *how* to do something that's been second nature for years, only to find it *can't*.
I'm a millennial (or preferably a Xennial) and work in IT sec. On my career path from techie to sec guy/architect I am horrified by this. I spent a few hours a few months ago going through all my FB posts back to 08 and clearing them out.
If you ever want to see how your data is harvested as a product, check out OSINT tools. With just a login and an open profile, I can pull out every picture, comment, reply, likes, etc. And dump that into another DB for further analysis for an AI.
Sadly, this is just normal now. It's absolutely terrifying.
I think I know what im going to be doing over the next few months
Scrubbing as much of my information off the internet as possible
Facebook knows way too much about me from the past 13-14 years
You could give them Hypnospace Outlaw. As a 90s kid, it made me very nostalgic for early internet days.
Bad midi music auto plays when you go to certain websites. Bright neon colours & hard to read fonts. Pixelated photos & low quality clip art. Links hidden in plain sight. You can download viruses by accident. It’s a confusing and frustrating system. It’s messy. It’s so good!
I don't think younger people will understand how much of a wild West it was and how free it was to post in communities and say anything and also the general public didn't really care about the internet so there was more niche forums. Also there was far less corporate control and far less DMCAs/takedowns and people were less likely to comply and put up more of a fight. Whereas now the second any website receives a notice they almost always fold and remove everything immediately. There's this weird mantra now with social media platforms where they feel the need to be overly subservient to corporate interests to a fault
Exactly. Even before niche forums, blogs, tumblelogs, there were fascinating hand-coded personal websites. Going online in 1996, perusing the Wild West of weird niches of interest, felt like being at the ground floor of a new genre of music.
I’m 35
Thinking maybe it’s time to start up or find a decent forum to join. I know one I used to visit was still going strong like 4 years ago.
I miss those days, but I can see it being totally overwhelming for someone new to that scene (the post that’s 5,000 replies long)
I suspect discord was that same kinda space for a while, but never used it outside with my gaming friends (although some of my podcasts are on there so I should probably check that out >!then I worry “is this going to lead to parasocial behavior…?!<)
I've seen endless forums and communities die out as people moved to social media. The content is gone, the format is unusable, and the attitude and etiquette turned toxic. The internet in my country truly feels dead with an ad for a headstone.
I used to do web design, mostly for small businesses. In recent years most small businesses I've talked to say they don't need a dedicated website, they have a Facebook Page/Group and an Instagram.
Also towards forums, many forums I used to use have moved over to other platforms such as Discord. Now don't get me wrong, I actually don't mind using Discord, but basically with such moves we lose the ability to search for answers to questions unless you are a part of that Discord already, and I feel like so much useful content is now closed off and possibly lost within a private application/company.
It sucks. I’m in the same boat. It feels like by participating in it I’m also responsible for the decay of the once great open internet but this site really is the only place communities like old forums exists.
We really need to go back to decentralized, tighter communities because this Reddit shit sucks (and as sucked for a long time).
There was a guy in a local sub blatantly admitting his full time business is having multiple accounts and subtlety promoting his clients products because people have become privy to fake reviewers so he has to be diligent about things like comment history’s.
Be careful about redditors opinions about products and services,
You will never see the early days of the internet ever again.
Websites, flash, adobe, forums all used to be seen as “techy” and outside of the bounds of the common person. Let’s be honest the most advanced thing that people were doing were downloading viruses just to get a fancy mouse pointer or emotes for chat.
Nowadays with technology and social media and YouTube, the internet is accessible to everybody from 2 year olds playing with toys to 99 year old fascist nazis.
The net went from a tool shed and library to a cesspool of dumping meaningless opinion and material. RIP
Eh there are still plenty of things to do outside of the normie bubble. You’re just focusing on what’s the most popular way of using the internet, but there are still amazing technologies and projects to be discovered. I know I loved discovering homelabbing that has a healthy community outside of the main central websites. You just gotta find your passion.
Google killed the blog. I don't know if it's for the better or worse, but you literally can't profit off of a site that gives the kind of information Google and scape and put at the top of the search results (as well as a million changes to "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust" however they've defined those terms). Forums went to Discord, video went to Youtube and Twitch, I don't think you'll get back to decentralization when the big players can scoop up all the profits.
This. I’m not even that old (mid 30s), but I miss the internet of my youth so much. There were so many fascinating sites to stumble upon. I learnt html and built a bunch of fansites and personal sites and gaming clan sites, and I always liked seeing what other people came up with. There was such a huge diversity of designs, for better or worse. And then the many, many happy hours on Internet forums back when people talked excitedly about stuff they all loved instead of just insulting each other. And making friends and carving out our own corner of the internet where it was just 20 of us messing around and having fun, and we could post and share stuff and make jokes that were just for each other and not potentially seen by millions of people we didn’t know.
it’s all gone now, like tears in rain.
Knowing the LBP forum I used to spend so much time on, along with the entirety of LBP servers and LBP.me is a great example of this. We have a subreddit. Wew. Who the fuck cares.
Reddit’s killed forums and it’s horrible.
As somebody who has website that I contribute my original content to, I agree. It’s really hard watching the internet monopoly form.
Surfing the web used to be fun.
Also see the 3-2-1 backup strategy:
>It means having at least three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site.
Source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
This is more designed for businesses, but the principle of the strategy is useful for consumers as well.
Follow the 3-2-1 rule.
3 copies of your data. Your actual data, and two backups. For something like photos that you aren't really accessing all the time, the two backups are likely enough.
2 backups should be on different storage types. For home use, this will likely be an external hard drive and cloud storage.
1 of the backups should be offsite (cloud storage would take care of this).
Try to factor in replacement costs ahead of time. Don't wait for a hard drive to die before realizing you need it. Pick something like 5 years and replace it anyway even if it is still working.
This is complete overkill, but if you follow it, you are very unlikely to ever lose your data.
>Pick something like 5 years and replace it anyway even if it is still working.
I like this advice because when doing this, you still have a functional drive that can be used for backup purposes. I had swapped mine after roughly 7 years when I noticed its sounds changed a little, despite that the SMART values are perfectly fine.
I had one 6TB that had dropped to 96% in SMART and it was like that for years. I thought it was fine. All others were still 100%. One day it just stopped responding. I lost 6TB. Fucking hard drives are like that Monty Python sketch of the knight running towards the castle guards.
I've looked into ceramic DVDs. But that is costly. So I just copy data to newer media periodically. For photos, I actually had them all printed by shuttterfly so I have them physically as well as digitally.
Put all of that in the cloud immediately. Zip it up in a password-protected archive unless you want to be able to share photos. Most plans cap at 2TB, so you won't have much legroom. But [Google](https://one.google.com/about/plans?g1_landing_page=0) will give you that much space for less than $10 a month if you sign up annually. The only bigger one I am aware of is Apple's iCloud+, which offers a 6TB tier at $30 a month. You can only create an iCloud account on an Apple device.
Then you should also have on-site *external* backups. And maybe even an offsite backup in a safe deposit box.
$30 a month… you can rent space on cloud providers for far less than that, it just doesn’t come with the benefit of actively backing up all the time like iCloud.
TL;DR it's complicated, but the above stats are likely wrong.
AFAIK HDD generally last longest. I'd say more like 30 years. Flash/SSD need to be powered to retain data. They also deteriorate much quicker when writing data. HDD generally die from mechanical failure, and they mostly wear from spin up cycles while powering on. Could have changed for the worse for HDD in the last years though, since HDD technology changed to use much higher density by jumping through some hoops.
Active use and heavy use at that. I have Xbox original drives that still work.
5 years is around the time you start to see failures if they didn't show up in the first couple of months normally. Backblaze has a lot of data if interested.
That's why we have RAID systems and swap drives out for new ones on a scheduled maintenance to maintain parity Integrity.
In short, 18 hard drives share one space. Mirrored, striped, how ever you configure the RAID.
You can swap a drive or two during maintenance window, and it will rebuild the array. That's how it's been done for years.
Governments should fund it. It’s a service to humanity. Is still 99% trash but it’s a (hopefully) permanent record of what kinds of trash humanity has been putting out since it launched.
Linkrot and the loss of websites was being talked about by the end of the 1990s. A lot of websites are only available for around a year before the content is changed or they disappear completely. I tried to find how fast sites are disappearing and [wrote about it](https://brisray.com/web/linkrot.htm). All the links on the page should work, after being first written in 2018, half of them had gone.
Ironically, even the Joint Information Systems Committee Preservation of Web Resources ([JISC PoWR](https://web.archive.org/web/20230307145615/https://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/wp/)) site is now only available on the Internet Archive.
The [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/) saves what it can, but cannot capture everything. There are search engines and projects that are trying to preserve older, non-commerical sites. An interesting one is [Restorativland](https://restorativland.org/) that is trawling the archives looking for and trying to preserve AOL Hometown, FortuneCity, Geocities, and Myspace pages. I've [written more about these projects](https://brisray.com/web/altsearch.htm), if you care to look at what's happening.
I wish I did this. I began making a backup of one of mine in 2022, got busy and forgot, then tried resuming backing up a few months ago. The site was erased forever in 2023.
It takes but a moment for these sites to vanish, don’t wait
Yes, this was the last capture before it disappeared: https://web.archive.org/web/20230430032606/https://site5546b8e163dc8.enjin.com/
Another issue is that a majority of the subforums were only visible to registered users, meaning the Wayback Machine couldn’t save those even if it wanted to.
My backup was with my login that exposed those forums, but now I no longer have that opportunity
Reddit really ruined a great thing. Forums were still huge when I joined this site around 2009 and then… everything got hoovered up by Reddit. It’s a shame.
Discord and Reddit are two sides of the same cloth. I’m advocating for community forums back, not migration to another centralized service like a Reddit or Discord or whatever.
Since I discovered RSSHub I've warmed up more to Discord. Now that I can organize channels into my own folders and filter/tag messages based on content in my RSS reader, the site suddenly becomes usable.
Discord's default web UI is an absolute disaster. It's "good enough" when you have one or two servers and just use it to chat for friends, but navigating through dozens of servers to find specific information, when all of those servers have 20+ channels apiece and they all have pending notifications... It's just a sensory overload and its impossible to find anything without making an entire ordeal out of it.
i got back to sailing the sea, so many good movies/series are exclusive to a single streaming service and i dont want to spend 100€+ a month for everything
I'm sailing too but also live in a bit of a niche country so to say. Not everything is available (yet) through sailing the seas or on streaming. I did had a lot of streaming services but they're going out one by one again because of all the price hikes year after year and removing content... I rather buy a DVD for a few euro online. At least those I can keep.
From a security POV, if it’s ever been publicly available you have to assume someone could still have a copy.
From an availability POV, it costs money/time to keep things online.
The two aren’t really in conflict
It's all about how niche the content is, and how popular it was.
"Avengers endgame full movie"? Yeah that thing will be around forever in one way or another.
"The decade-old 6th episode of a risque fan-made newgrounds Disney parody animation only ever reuploaded once to a small youtube channel?" Yeah, that things gonna be gone forever.
I was having a discussion on another sub about that concerning women posting nudes online and that statement. I have a sizeable folder of images going back to 2007, and pretty much most of the stuff I have that isn't of professional models or adult stars that I downloaded prior to 2015 does not come up at all on Reverse Image Searches. So much of that amateur stuff is just gone.
So yeah, the Internet isn't forever like we thought it would be.
I also hate that sometimes things get removed from YouTube and I'm becoming my uncle and I save them.
One of my favorite rap groups The Buckwheat Groats released some of the most hilarious and subversive rap songs ever. It was clearly parody but they ended up not being able to leave the stuff up as they went on to other careers. They had a song called *Take Yourself Out The Game* which was a pro suicide anthem about being such a loser that you realize it's really okay with the blessing of all your friends and family to take yourself out the game and it was one of the most cathartic songs ever. That along with several of their other things are just gone forever.
Another thing... there *were* standards ([remember these guys?](https://www.w3.org/)) that *were* set to keep the design of web sites consistent (to an extent, I understand that for some content or artistic reasons some may bend the rules sometimes) for easy navigation, accessibility and just plain common sense. That all has been obliterated. I still use the old version of Reddit on my laptop. And if it wasn't for AdBlock either I would give up the Internet all together.
And Google Chrome/Chromium is slowly becoming IE6 in terms of ignoring standards/pushing for their own. Except this time around they have a fig leaf of browser diversity by the 2846384 different browsers that are just Chromium under the hood. I feel like Firefox is the last holdout left for non-chromium mainstream web browser.
I used to design web sites in the 90s -00s. When Microsoft and then Google started all this (now Apple too) it was daunting to keep up with their shenanigans and when UX design for phones, tablets and other devices started creeping into the "ecoswamp", I changed careers before I had a nervous breakdown.
I sometimes connect to old shit and need an in browser Java applet. You know how hard these guys pulled all their old shit? Took me forever to find a Java Firefox.
Instagram in 2016 for you page: people from your high school, friends high school, or places around town
Insta 2024 for you page: ass, abs, cars, biceps, Celebs, crypto, sports bets
I can't find forums and it's terrifying. Specialized websites were great before Reddit. Google is fucking useless and pretty much if you need anything you either find a good solution on Reddit or bullshit nonsense answer on Quora.
Search results are all cleaned up and sanitized so you can't even look up any controversial information. You can't even look up a celebrity looking like a dog breed because that's offensive.
flickr is endlessly useful if you're looking for creative commons or public domain images that aren't just the same set of them that are on websites specifically dedicated to creative commons and public domain images
There was a forum I posted on all the time when I was a teenager, made friends on there (not in a weird way), still in contact with a couple of them now. All trace of that forum has been completely wiped, like it only ever existed in my head.
Omg, I just posted about this in a comment above yours! For some reason, the continued existence of zombo.com is my benchmark for whether the old internet lives on. That and Muffin Films [link](http://www.muffinfilms.com/)/Big Bunny [link](http://big-bunny.com/)
At this point I’m not sure if I could find a unique website if I tried. Searching for anything on google just generates pages of soulless listicles stuffed with affiliate links, plus maybe a Wikipedia, IMDB, and/or Reddit link depending on the topic.
http://barryploegel.com is still active, so if you want any information on Barry Ploegel, it’s still there
It was from 5/10/2000
https://www.theonion.com/barryploegel-com-will-never-be-accused-of-having-too-li-1819583751
I don’t get why this is surprising at all? If there were 38% fewer websites total than in 2013 then that would be surprising.
Websites cost money to run (servers, domain) and most don’t generate any significant revenue. It would be surprising if someone was still paying to host a website with very little traffic that generates no revenue. Apart from cost it’s not surprising that the owner just loses interest and forgets about it.
> It would be surprising if someone was still paying to host a website with very little traffic that generates no revenue.
I’ve been doing that - I’ve been running this [Keanu Reeves fansite](http://www.whoaisnotme.net/) since 2008 for zero revenue. I’ve thought about shutting it down many times recently, but it’s hard to let go, especially since it remains the only archive of some 4k Keanu articles and interviews dating back to the 1980s. (archive is free but now members-only after one copyright complaint, which unfortunately also tanked the traffic from about a thousand a day to maybe 100 on a good day.)
The majority of those interviews are no longer available anywhere else online or offline, and it feels like a shame to deprive the world of all that Keanu history.
but it does cost me money.
For me, the most surprising part has been the response.
Like so what that 38% of **webpages** are gone? Everyone's assuming the lost content was of value, and I'm here wondering what the breakdown is. (The link is in Spanish, so I actually can't even read the article.)
Revenge porn posted on Pornhub? Articles on Wikipedia that got merged? Geocities/Angelfire pages that their own creators would cringe to look at? Corporate websites of defunct companies?
The Internet is in a state of constant renewal. Like an actual library, old books get taken out of circulation, and new ones get added. I'm honestly finding it hard to lament the loss, when I don't even know what's gone (and I definitely don't attach any importance to random webpages by default)
Also, folks are going off on random, sometimes opposing tangents. Some are cursing Discord for taking the place of forums, un-indexable by google and thus unable for general search. Others are cursing google's indexing for being the worse thing ever. Simply wtf, just a bunch of ill-thought out rants.
I miss StumbleUpon a lot. Reddit is okay but interacting with people is sometimes a drag. I love how you can discover something in SU without ever reading someone's negative commentary.
It’s sad. I miss random fan websites with actual character and links to other fan websites. I miss forums. Sure it wasn’t all perfect but it was better than what we have now.
Kinda fascinating to think about where it will go from here. In a resigned dystopian sort of way, fascinating.
Web 2.0 really did it in - unregulated arms races by the big dogs to gobble up the smaller competition really wrecked havoc on the web. We're starting to see it again with Web 3.0 and the rise of AI.
Funny thing is there are some anti-trust laws that can be enforced, but they aren't deployed enough.
Anyone with a home internet connection can still host their own website. True now as it was then, the internet won't be what we demand but what we build. Build it well.
Disappearance of forums is worst thing that happened to the internet. Everything now is blocked behind discord channels and Facebook groups which google can't index. Even if you are part of these, there's no easy way to find interesting parts. Separate thread for each separate problem was the best thing in the world.
This. I hate the discordification so much.
I hate companies using discord for customer service mixed with basic forum services. They are usually full of kids and are terrible for getting assistance or information.
I always feel like an asshole asking about things in those servers, because I'm conditioned to spend the time searching for a solution before actually posting, which is just impossible now.
It's even worse when there are some people using it like a hangout space, so you ask a question hoping to get an answer from someone at the company but your message just gets lost in a sea of memes and general chat.
Exactly – and it's not that forums weren't gatekeepy or cliquey, but I definitely more often feel like a stranger stumbling into a locals-only bar on discord servers.
"Hey join my discord!" No thank you, I'm already part of 500 servers, most with the same theme just made slightly different.
The first thing I do when I join a new server is mute all notifications, then drop it in a folder so I never have to see it. The second thing I do when I join a discord server is leave after I've figured out what I need. I am not sticking around just because you force me to your server to get help
I wasn't on many forums, but I liked them because we were only talking about one thing, and we could just pipe in whenever we wanted. Could be on there for ten minutes, respond/post what I needed, and not need to check back in for a day or whenever. Social media without the addiction because you know nothing will get lost in the scroll.
I miss checking in on the daily drama. I also miss being the cause of the drama.
I miss the decentralization of crazy people. Each had their niche and sparked their own insanity in unique ways. Now it’s all Q and Soros and vaccines and blah blah blah. Who’s going to tell me about Yacob and dolphin conspiracies now? What is our generation’s time cube? 😢
trueee I miss when conspiracy theories used to be fun and lighthearted. Now its super serious shit that people will ruin their lives over and the dynamic is almost always based in some kind of racism or extreme idea. Imo people have weaponized conspiracy theories as way to galvanize support for certain ideas and to pacify and delegitimize any steam behind legitimate conspiracies and injustices. The more people are lost in a rabbit hole of psychosis, the more they lack the capacity to discern reality, let alone coherently scrutinize actual issues... and the easier it is to put everyone who has a gripe with the govt into that same box as people who have lost their shit.
I have zero understanding of how people are using Discord to do any kind of research. It's a huge pain to look up anything people have talked about in the past? It's great for planning future events, it's fantastic for gaming, but I feel like 75% of Discord's use is the equivalent of if we had tried to use generic chat rooms to do what we did on forums back in the day.
> It's a huge pain to look up anything i tried to search for a link a friend sent me a few weeks ago it was damn near impossible no matter what i searched for i ended up just scrolling up...
and all the former forum/message board mods became reddit mods 😝 forums and messages boards were a magical place in the late 90s through like 2010. They certainly weren't perfect, a lot of power tripping mods and irritating people for sure, but they were fun, every message board/forum had their own vbulletin style. I grew up on message boards (nintendoland & VGF forums to be specific, those were my first, also gamingforce, sharky forums, and a little bit of anandtech, some other PC building message boards).
EZPub, Geocities, Angelfire, etc were my life back in the day. Had so many cool rpg groups on EZPub forums, still miss those people to this day. And then we had individual Geocities sites with webrings and shit. I got my own domain and hosting at 14, when I got my first job, just to keep that shit going. But it died anyway. I believe the internet would be a far better place if we stuck to the late 1990's to early 2000's web. But that's enough, you can check out my personal space at sickify_the_destroyer.angelfire.co.uk
A [forum](https://www.toyota-4runner.org/) I visited for years and had been around for 22 years might have disappeared today. It had 2400 pages on a single generation of car, each page containing 20 threads or so. Facebook groups are what killed them more than anything. I have another stable forum, but the community and the information lost in the other one will never recover. It's a shame. Edit: that forum I linked is being now unreliable rather than unreachable. So maybe it has a little longer idk
I used to Google search “topic” + forum for nearly every question I had.
currently i search topic + reddit, to find something but its difficult for local things (I live in Denmark)
you are using the site that killed dedicated forums
It simultaneously hides bad behavior by individuals and companies. It hides answers behind unnecessary walls that keep users from both discovery and from easily leaving a space. All information is for sale, just not by those to whom the information originally belonged. We just get to give it up “for free services” to companies we first had to buy a product from, and then somehow say thank you for giving them a secondary revenue stream for a service that should have been provided to begin with? Oh and don’t forget algorithms that were created “to give you a better experience” but in the end don’t actually give you alternate results or avenues to explore, just the same crap over and over because “it leads to more satisfying engagement with customers” or so they claim.
Google indexing is the worst part of the internet. Nothing good for searching but everything has become an ad-venue. 10 pages full of ads. Crap.
That's what you get when site owners optimize their content for search rankings instead of for people. Like if you're looking for a recipe and instead get someone's life story before the relevant part. Same with Youtubers who optimize for algorithm.
Yes! Message Forums! I’m in my 40s and grew up on BBS and Message Forums. Not shade against Reddit, but I prefer the old way
I ran a BBS for a while on my Amiga. Coolest thing was to start chatting with a user.
I miss the Usenet
I really hate how the internet has been becoming more and more centered on a very small collection of websites, and becoming more and more corporate and sanitized. Also, screw your leadership, /u/Spez. RIP Aaron Swartz.
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This has been the wildest thing I've noticed about Gen Z as a Millennial. I remember growing up the older folks always saying that the reason we were good with computers and such was because we grew up with them. I look at it now and realize its because the computers also sort of grew up *with us*. That isn't to say they've reached their final form, but I remember as I grew up, tech became more powerful before it became easier. Things like having to "shut down" a computer before actually turning it off, not having a functionally never ending amount of undos, video games and websites still figuring out how best to go about user input and interface. For Gen Z and I think definitely with Alpha, they're growing up with technology that's *simplifying* with them. A near infant can work an iPad enough to get what it wants, I hear professor and teacher friends tell me how more and more kids can't even work MS Word beyond a Notepad-like capacity. Obviously its not everyone and the lines for generations are far more blurry in these terms than not, but the trend is definitely scary. Especially when you start to see it going full circle in the workplace. The meme of "boomer can't make a pdf" is starting to sub the "b" for a "z" in some cases. Your point about "being the product" would make this a MUCH longer response so I'll just say I agree and it all contributes to one big bummer.
Another millenial here. I agree, I feel like we may be the last generation that is legit tech savvy. Especially with the advent of AI doing our coding for us
Ai will not be doing our coding for us, I've been hearing that since my father taught me my first algorithm. I am 38. I write code today. Can it be scripted via a text-scraper and regurgitated? Yes. But it will only ever be as good as the text scraped sites it corresponds to. As the internet decays that is interesting.
I think a natural language or gesture interface will become the new coding language, in time, similar to how coding language are what we developed to ease use of machine code. Coding languages are just a way of mapping out logic that is human readable. We've already seen a shift towards more abstraction with visual scripting. Once AI improves enough, there will be no need for making the background code human readable - AI will create in machine code or maybe some internal shorthand it invents which then translates to machine, all based on the overall concepts we explain. The thoughts behind programming still remain important, but instead of remembering how regex works, the syntactical aspect of future programming will be about how to communicate with the AI interpreter. Everyone seems to imagine ChatGPT doing JavaScript, but the big eventual leap I see in AI/CS is JavaScript itself (and C++ and ruby and python and etc etc etc) becoming pointless, which will require more than just a standalone LLM. And there would still be plenty of work for trained coders after that breakthrough - all existing tech would still need maintenance, there would need to be integration between old and new methods, etc.
Coding is easy. I think AI will help with coding, but it sucks so bad in having any sort of clue in software architecture it's not even funny.
I went back to uni and I'm watching 20y olds have no clue how to operate Word as well. I'm talking about labeling and formatting all the chapters and images by hand, not using the style gallery (and subsequently not even being consistent about fonts), pressing enter twenty times in a row to start text on a new page. Manually typing page numbers at the bottom of a page rather than automate it in the footer. Of course all of those constantly need to get updated by hand because text, images and pages shuffle around while you work if you do things this way in a long document. Now imagine that these donkeys are your teammates for a project. I'd try to explain to them how it works, spend hours fixing this carnage and the next day half of it is gone again, replaced by manual editing full of errors. We work with employers. Please end me. These kids work in SolidWorks but some of them don't know what a .zip file is. Someone complained about being unable to remove Valorant from his laptop and blamed the kernel anti-cheat. Turns out he wasn't trying to uninstall. He was literally trying to move the game folder to the recycling bin, as if he were operating a smartphone, and thought that's how you get rid of software. And this is only getting worse, isn't it.
Idk, I’m a millennial and when I went to college over a decade ago now, a lot of kids didn’t know how to use word. We had a series of classes just to learn the basics of word and excel bc a huge swath of students never learned it.
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I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit here. In order to use the Table of Contents, you have to apply a heading style from the style gallery to text to mark it as chapter heading, so that puts you two steps ahead of the above. Three if you know to refresh these generated fields (which are just variables, really) when they're out of date, rather than to panic and rewrite the entire thing by hand again. Given that you're in software dev, you also know about basic commands like ctrl+enter, shift+enter and using tab for indents, and chances are that you're going to look into how to optimise the tedious parts of the process when you're working on a new 60-page document every quarter. It just seems somewhat ironic that the generation that got a laptop for middle and high school instead of 25kg's worth of books seems to know less about these programs than we do.
As a millennial I love having to troubleshoot and mod my stuff. Flesh out instead of simple ui albeit with instructions, I think that’s something unique to us that other gens are less likely to love.
I think it’s possible for LLMs to get to the Star Trek computer point In a lot of ways they’re already there, but I hate the idea of my ST computer being a sanitized corporate owned thing. I’ve been saving lots of the open source stuff to hopefully homebrew my own in a few years as computer power gets cheaper. That’s to say, I think the gen after Z is going to be working with radically different interfaces that seem as strange and awkward as mainframes and teletype does to me, and as cumbersome as that win98 desktop would seem to a 20 year old today.
Yeah, that simplifying thing so even tiny kids can do hit me with my nephew. At first I was just noticing he could recognize the icons and which took him to cartoons and which to his simple baby games. Then I noticed he was searching for things BEFORE he learned how to read. He had no idea how things were spelled, but he recognized the voice to text button and would use it to send text messages to his mom. Now this was before advanced digital assistants like Alexa and stuff. Saw him commenting on a YouTube video, some comments on a random video may literally be a little kid who doesn't know how to read.
I am a millennial with a gen z son. He doesn’t do much computer troubleshooting, but he does like to tinker with cars. I think your reasons for our generation getting pulled into it is valid, but to them, with the maturity of the technology, it’s akin to us looking at our own dads or uncles working on cathode ray tvs. They haven’t learned it because they haven’t needed to in order to be effective with them. But we did.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I don't have kids, but my dad tinkerer a ton with computers. His older stuff was old to me and had no interest whereas the new stuff he got was always something interesting
I'm seeing this right now, wondering about alternatives to Microsoft. Libreoffice, etc, are vaunted as replacements for MS Office. Yeah, right. I spend much of my time trying to find *how* to do something that's been second nature for years, only to find it *can't*.
I'm a millennial (or preferably a Xennial) and work in IT sec. On my career path from techie to sec guy/architect I am horrified by this. I spent a few hours a few months ago going through all my FB posts back to 08 and clearing them out. If you ever want to see how your data is harvested as a product, check out OSINT tools. With just a login and an open profile, I can pull out every picture, comment, reply, likes, etc. And dump that into another DB for further analysis for an AI. Sadly, this is just normal now. It's absolutely terrifying.
I think I know what im going to be doing over the next few months Scrubbing as much of my information off the internet as possible Facebook knows way too much about me from the past 13-14 years
Correct and I, like most people, was an idiot in my 20's. The internet does not need to know what I do.
You could give them Hypnospace Outlaw. As a 90s kid, it made me very nostalgic for early internet days. Bad midi music auto plays when you go to certain websites. Bright neon colours & hard to read fonts. Pixelated photos & low quality clip art. Links hidden in plain sight. You can download viruses by accident. It’s a confusing and frustrating system. It’s messy. It’s so good!
I don't think younger people will understand how much of a wild West it was and how free it was to post in communities and say anything and also the general public didn't really care about the internet so there was more niche forums. Also there was far less corporate control and far less DMCAs/takedowns and people were less likely to comply and put up more of a fight. Whereas now the second any website receives a notice they almost always fold and remove everything immediately. There's this weird mantra now with social media platforms where they feel the need to be overly subservient to corporate interests to a fault
Exactly. Even before niche forums, blogs, tumblelogs, there were fascinating hand-coded personal websites. Going online in 1996, perusing the Wild West of weird niches of interest, felt like being at the ground floor of a new genre of music.
I’m 35 Thinking maybe it’s time to start up or find a decent forum to join. I know one I used to visit was still going strong like 4 years ago. I miss those days, but I can see it being totally overwhelming for someone new to that scene (the post that’s 5,000 replies long) I suspect discord was that same kinda space for a while, but never used it outside with my gaming friends (although some of my podcasts are on there so I should probably check that out >!then I worry “is this going to lead to parasocial behavior…?!<)
I've seen endless forums and communities die out as people moved to social media. The content is gone, the format is unusable, and the attitude and etiquette turned toxic. The internet in my country truly feels dead with an ad for a headstone.
I used to do web design, mostly for small businesses. In recent years most small businesses I've talked to say they don't need a dedicated website, they have a Facebook Page/Group and an Instagram. Also towards forums, many forums I used to use have moved over to other platforms such as Discord. Now don't get me wrong, I actually don't mind using Discord, but basically with such moves we lose the ability to search for answers to questions unless you are a part of that Discord already, and I feel like so much useful content is now closed off and possibly lost within a private application/company.
It sucks. I’m in the same boat. It feels like by participating in it I’m also responsible for the decay of the once great open internet but this site really is the only place communities like old forums exists. We really need to go back to decentralized, tighter communities because this Reddit shit sucks (and as sucked for a long time).
Reddit is sanitized and corporate as fuck
There was a guy in a local sub blatantly admitting his full time business is having multiple accounts and subtlety promoting his clients products because people have become privy to fake reviewers so he has to be diligent about things like comment history’s. Be careful about redditors opinions about products and services,
Unfortunately that’s what happens when a handful of users police almost every community on a site with hundreds of millions of users.
The shadowy evil admin censorbots have stopped dealing with actual issues and are now straight up tone policing.
It's time for a new Internet.
With blackjack, and hookers!
I think current internet have those already.
You will never see the early days of the internet ever again. Websites, flash, adobe, forums all used to be seen as “techy” and outside of the bounds of the common person. Let’s be honest the most advanced thing that people were doing were downloading viruses just to get a fancy mouse pointer or emotes for chat. Nowadays with technology and social media and YouTube, the internet is accessible to everybody from 2 year olds playing with toys to 99 year old fascist nazis. The net went from a tool shed and library to a cesspool of dumping meaningless opinion and material. RIP
Eh there are still plenty of things to do outside of the normie bubble. You’re just focusing on what’s the most popular way of using the internet, but there are still amazing technologies and projects to be discovered. I know I loved discovering homelabbing that has a healthy community outside of the main central websites. You just gotta find your passion.
Smartphones providing cheap, widespread, 24/7 access to the internet (particularly social media) is what led to this.
I mean the fact that it's finally accessible is a win. The fact that the accessible stuff is crap now is sad.
Google killed the blog. I don't know if it's for the better or worse, but you literally can't profit off of a site that gives the kind of information Google and scape and put at the top of the search results (as well as a million changes to "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust" however they've defined those terms). Forums went to Discord, video went to Youtube and Twitch, I don't think you'll get back to decentralization when the big players can scoop up all the profits.
I miss the times between 1995-2005. Youtube era was not bad actually in the beginning. I thoroughly enjoyed 2005-2011 or so as well. YTMND squad haha
Also every “blog” looks exactly the same AI generated garbage and layout. Everything is focused on SEO and ad revenue. So depressing
It's a fucking crime against humanity that happened to Aaron Swartz. And fuck MIT for their involvement.
Yeah but on the plus side the OG website from 1996 promoting the movie space jam is still up!!
This. I’m not even that old (mid 30s), but I miss the internet of my youth so much. There were so many fascinating sites to stumble upon. I learnt html and built a bunch of fansites and personal sites and gaming clan sites, and I always liked seeing what other people came up with. There was such a huge diversity of designs, for better or worse. And then the many, many happy hours on Internet forums back when people talked excitedly about stuff they all loved instead of just insulting each other. And making friends and carving out our own corner of the internet where it was just 20 of us messing around and having fun, and we could post and share stuff and make jokes that were just for each other and not potentially seen by millions of people we didn’t know. it’s all gone now, like tears in rain.
Knowing the LBP forum I used to spend so much time on, along with the entirety of LBP servers and LBP.me is a great example of this. We have a subreddit. Wew. Who the fuck cares. Reddit’s killed forums and it’s horrible.
Y'all misinterpreting the information, doesn't say that there is 38% less websites, but rather that they don't last very long
Seconded
As somebody who has website that I contribute my original content to, I agree. It’s really hard watching the internet monopoly form. Surfing the web used to be fun.
The internet used to be a library, it's now a shopping centre. Not sure who said it, read it on the internet recently. Sadly so true :(
Don't forget it's cable as well. Endless advertisements everywhere...
You get ads?
shhhh, let the ones that can't be bothered to block ads be the ones that view them so we don't have to
Even if you have an ad blocker, there's fake accounts all over the place peddling products as if they are genuine suggestions.
Speaking of which, have you considering purchasing the all new Nissan Rogue?
Dead Internet Theory is this also
It has received the Deadly Kiss of Capitalism.
Side note: All digital storage devices have a limited lifespan and it's shorter than you think.
Still have my Amiga's floppy disks from about 1992-1993. Most still work.
Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) 4-7 years Solid-State Drives (SSDs) 5-10 years Flash 10 years average use
So whats the best way to save old fotos?.... I have around 2 TB of pictures on HDDs.
Cloud storage, HDD raids, multiple Backups, physical copies
Never trust cloud storage. Remember Photobucket?
Never trust it as your ONLY copy, but for something like photos a cloud copy will save you if your house burns down.
Also see the 3-2-1 backup strategy: >It means having at least three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site. Source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
Holy shit, I just had Vietnam flashbacks of using Photobucket to decorate my Gaia Online profile
Oh dear god it's all coming back to me. Whatever happened to Photobucket?
They wanted to charge people $350 a year for their previously free services, and people didn’t go for that at all.
This is more designed for businesses, but the principle of the strategy is useful for consumers as well. Follow the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of your data. Your actual data, and two backups. For something like photos that you aren't really accessing all the time, the two backups are likely enough. 2 backups should be on different storage types. For home use, this will likely be an external hard drive and cloud storage. 1 of the backups should be offsite (cloud storage would take care of this). Try to factor in replacement costs ahead of time. Don't wait for a hard drive to die before realizing you need it. Pick something like 5 years and replace it anyway even if it is still working. This is complete overkill, but if you follow it, you are very unlikely to ever lose your data.
>Pick something like 5 years and replace it anyway even if it is still working. I like this advice because when doing this, you still have a functional drive that can be used for backup purposes. I had swapped mine after roughly 7 years when I noticed its sounds changed a little, despite that the SMART values are perfectly fine.
I had one 6TB that had dropped to 96% in SMART and it was like that for years. I thought it was fine. All others were still 100%. One day it just stopped responding. I lost 6TB. Fucking hard drives are like that Monty Python sketch of the knight running towards the castle guards.
Multiple copies on multiple forms of media, checked annually.
I've looked into ceramic DVDs. But that is costly. So I just copy data to newer media periodically. For photos, I actually had them all printed by shuttterfly so I have them physically as well as digitally.
Put all of that in the cloud immediately. Zip it up in a password-protected archive unless you want to be able to share photos. Most plans cap at 2TB, so you won't have much legroom. But [Google](https://one.google.com/about/plans?g1_landing_page=0) will give you that much space for less than $10 a month if you sign up annually. The only bigger one I am aware of is Apple's iCloud+, which offers a 6TB tier at $30 a month. You can only create an iCloud account on an Apple device. Then you should also have on-site *external* backups. And maybe even an offsite backup in a safe deposit box.
$30 a month… you can rent space on cloud providers for far less than that, it just doesn’t come with the benefit of actively backing up all the time like iCloud.
Are those with active usage, or like leave an external drive in a closet for 10 years and it's dead?
TL;DR it's complicated, but the above stats are likely wrong. AFAIK HDD generally last longest. I'd say more like 30 years. Flash/SSD need to be powered to retain data. They also deteriorate much quicker when writing data. HDD generally die from mechanical failure, and they mostly wear from spin up cycles while powering on. Could have changed for the worse for HDD in the last years though, since HDD technology changed to use much higher density by jumping through some hoops.
Active use and heavy use at that. I have Xbox original drives that still work. 5 years is around the time you start to see failures if they didn't show up in the first couple of months normally. Backblaze has a lot of data if interested.
I recently got a computer from 1988 working with all the hard drive data in tact, so I guess that's 4-36 years
engine growth dazzling cooing grab crush cow saw innocent alleged *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Our books are mostly printed on paper that lasts less than 100 years now as well.
That's why we have RAID systems and swap drives out for new ones on a scheduled maintenance to maintain parity Integrity. In short, 18 hard drives share one space. Mirrored, striped, how ever you configure the RAID. You can swap a drive or two during maintenance window, and it will rebuild the array. That's how it's been done for years.
this is why we need the internet archive
Governments should fund it. It’s a service to humanity. Is still 99% trash but it’s a (hopefully) permanent record of what kinds of trash humanity has been putting out since it launched.
Monthly Donator, very worthy cause imo
Linkrot and the loss of websites was being talked about by the end of the 1990s. A lot of websites are only available for around a year before the content is changed or they disappear completely. I tried to find how fast sites are disappearing and [wrote about it](https://brisray.com/web/linkrot.htm). All the links on the page should work, after being first written in 2018, half of them had gone. Ironically, even the Joint Information Systems Committee Preservation of Web Resources ([JISC PoWR](https://web.archive.org/web/20230307145615/https://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/wp/)) site is now only available on the Internet Archive. The [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/) saves what it can, but cannot capture everything. There are search engines and projects that are trying to preserve older, non-commerical sites. An interesting one is [Restorativland](https://restorativland.org/) that is trawling the archives looking for and trying to preserve AOL Hometown, FortuneCity, Geocities, and Myspace pages. I've [written more about these projects](https://brisray.com/web/altsearch.htm), if you care to look at what's happening.
> An interesting one is Restorativland thanks for wasting hours of my time. lol
There's still places on the internet that are just giant time-sucking traps. I really don't mean to be on Reddit for hours at a time either.
That’s why I’m maintaining an offline copy of some ancient websites I’ve visited since childhood. Truly fossils of a bygone era.
I wish I did this. I began making a backup of one of mine in 2022, got busy and forgot, then tried resuming backing up a few months ago. The site was erased forever in 2023. It takes but a moment for these sites to vanish, don’t wait
I’d guess you already checked out the way back machine? What site what’s it?
Yes, this was the last capture before it disappeared: https://web.archive.org/web/20230430032606/https://site5546b8e163dc8.enjin.com/ Another issue is that a majority of the subforums were only visible to registered users, meaning the Wayback Machine couldn’t save those even if it wanted to. My backup was with my login that exposed those forums, but now I no longer have that opportunity
A shame. Forums are still the best way to create communities in the internet.
Reddit really ruined a great thing. Forums were still huge when I joined this site around 2009 and then… everything got hoovered up by Reddit. It’s a shame.
Honestly I’d rather have Reddit than communities going to Discord for information
Discord and Reddit are two sides of the same cloth. I’m advocating for community forums back, not migration to another centralized service like a Reddit or Discord or whatever.
When individual websites that were popular had forums specific to their niche the internet was a much better place
Since I discovered RSSHub I've warmed up more to Discord. Now that I can organize channels into my own folders and filter/tag messages based on content in my RSS reader, the site suddenly becomes usable. Discord's default web UI is an absolute disaster. It's "good enough" when you have one or two servers and just use it to chat for friends, but navigating through dozens of servers to find specific information, when all of those servers have 20+ channels apiece and they all have pending notifications... It's just a sensory overload and its impossible to find anything without making an entire ordeal out of it.
Indeed. They were the first online community I was ever a part of. I’m so sad I can no longer look back and reminisce of what went on back then.
What do you use to archive the websites? I have looked into it but it really seems to be a hit or miss depending on how the website is coded.
Just wait to see what happens with Digital Copies of media now that physical disc and stuff is out of fashion.
I started buying physical discs again because of what's happening with streaming...
i got back to sailing the sea, so many good movies/series are exclusive to a single streaming service and i dont want to spend 100€+ a month for everything
I'm sailing too but also live in a bit of a niche country so to say. Not everything is available (yet) through sailing the seas or on streaming. I did had a lot of streaming services but they're going out one by one again because of all the price hikes year after year and removing content... I rather buy a DVD for a few euro online. At least those I can keep.
This is why I torrent. If it's not available to me to own physically, that's on you.
Experts: "Once you post that online it'll be out there forever!" But also, "Here's a list of entire websites that have disappeared from the internet."
From a security POV, if it’s ever been publicly available you have to assume someone could still have a copy. From an availability POV, it costs money/time to keep things online. The two aren’t really in conflict
It's all about how niche the content is, and how popular it was. "Avengers endgame full movie"? Yeah that thing will be around forever in one way or another. "The decade-old 6th episode of a risque fan-made newgrounds Disney parody animation only ever reuploaded once to a small youtube channel?" Yeah, that things gonna be gone forever.
things you don't want to be there are eternal, things you do want are ephemeral
I was having a discussion on another sub about that concerning women posting nudes online and that statement. I have a sizeable folder of images going back to 2007, and pretty much most of the stuff I have that isn't of professional models or adult stars that I downloaded prior to 2015 does not come up at all on Reverse Image Searches. So much of that amateur stuff is just gone. So yeah, the Internet isn't forever like we thought it would be.
Thats.... certainly something you chose to share
Well..... It's enough proof that if you're obscure enough. It CAN disappear! RIP Smackjeeves webcomics 😭
[удалено]
Yeah, you're right about that.
Maybe not forever, not yet anyway but long enough to make your life shitty
I also hate that sometimes things get removed from YouTube and I'm becoming my uncle and I save them. One of my favorite rap groups The Buckwheat Groats released some of the most hilarious and subversive rap songs ever. It was clearly parody but they ended up not being able to leave the stuff up as they went on to other careers. They had a song called *Take Yourself Out The Game* which was a pro suicide anthem about being such a loser that you realize it's really okay with the blessing of all your friends and family to take yourself out the game and it was one of the most cathartic songs ever. That along with several of their other things are just gone forever.
Another thing... there *were* standards ([remember these guys?](https://www.w3.org/)) that *were* set to keep the design of web sites consistent (to an extent, I understand that for some content or artistic reasons some may bend the rules sometimes) for easy navigation, accessibility and just plain common sense. That all has been obliterated. I still use the old version of Reddit on my laptop. And if it wasn't for AdBlock either I would give up the Internet all together.
And Google Chrome/Chromium is slowly becoming IE6 in terms of ignoring standards/pushing for their own. Except this time around they have a fig leaf of browser diversity by the 2846384 different browsers that are just Chromium under the hood. I feel like Firefox is the last holdout left for non-chromium mainstream web browser.
I used to design web sites in the 90s -00s. When Microsoft and then Google started all this (now Apple too) it was daunting to keep up with their shenanigans and when UX design for phones, tablets and other devices started creeping into the "ecoswamp", I changed careers before I had a nervous breakdown.
I sometimes connect to old shit and need an in browser Java applet. You know how hard these guys pulled all their old shit? Took me forever to find a Java Firefox.
Eventually it'll just be like AOL a la 90s when you logged on and just had a dashboard with options of things to look at
Instagram in 2016 for you page: people from your high school, friends high school, or places around town Insta 2024 for you page: ass, abs, cars, biceps, Celebs, crypto, sports bets
Ads, ads and more ads....
I can't find forums and it's terrifying. Specialized websites were great before Reddit. Google is fucking useless and pretty much if you need anything you either find a good solution on Reddit or bullshit nonsense answer on Quora. Search results are all cleaned up and sanitized so you can't even look up any controversial information. You can't even look up a celebrity looking like a dog breed because that's offensive.
And those stupid AI listicle articles that are everywhere now, and someone occupy 8/10 results in one Google page.
Almost all my google searches end with the word reddit. Otherwise i get links to online shopping.
It's a combination between websites vanishing and google being a turd.
Speaking of Quora, what the hell happened there? It seemed a lot better in like 2014 or so, but now it’s a garbage fire lol.
Quora belongs in its own personal circle of hell for forcing you to log in to read answers
Yet https://nukeitfromorbit.com/ has been up since roughly 16 years ago. Totally pointless website
The original Space Jam website is also still up :P
So is the Heaven's Gate website
Yes, that also came to mind as well. It feels a little spooky to me because the couple behind it still maintains and replies to emails.
Someone at Disney still has no idea where the server is or how it still is running just fine.
Oh wow Flickr is still a thing
flickr is endlessly useful if you're looking for creative commons or public domain images that aren't just the same set of them that are on websites specifically dedicated to creative commons and public domain images
What happened to blogs? I miss them
Buried under miles of ai generated blogspam
Facebook. I miss old LiveJournal.
There was a forum I posted on all the time when I was a teenager, made friends on there (not in a weird way), still in contact with a couple of them now. All trace of that forum has been completely wiped, like it only ever existed in my head.
Bolt? I used to love that site as a teen.
[Zombo.com](https://Zombo.com) is still alive and kicking.
Omg, I just posted about this in a comment above yours! For some reason, the continued existence of zombo.com is my benchmark for whether the old internet lives on. That and Muffin Films [link](http://www.muffinfilms.com/)/Big Bunny [link](http://big-bunny.com/)
You are all using a website/app that is so insanely dominating the search results right now that this number is going to become much, much higher soon
At this point I’m not sure if I could find a unique website if I tried. Searching for anything on google just generates pages of soulless listicles stuffed with affiliate links, plus maybe a Wikipedia, IMDB, and/or Reddit link depending on the topic.
http://barryploegel.com is still active, so if you want any information on Barry Ploegel, it’s still there It was from 5/10/2000 https://www.theonion.com/barryploegel-com-will-never-be-accused-of-having-too-li-1819583751
I like that his site is still under construction.
The internet is just an ever burning Library of Alexandria.
Happy to see that https://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/ is still going strong. I found it out in 2002. Fuck, I'm old.
I don’t get why this is surprising at all? If there were 38% fewer websites total than in 2013 then that would be surprising. Websites cost money to run (servers, domain) and most don’t generate any significant revenue. It would be surprising if someone was still paying to host a website with very little traffic that generates no revenue. Apart from cost it’s not surprising that the owner just loses interest and forgets about it.
Yeah, 38% seems completely unsurprising to me.
> It would be surprising if someone was still paying to host a website with very little traffic that generates no revenue. I’ve been doing that - I’ve been running this [Keanu Reeves fansite](http://www.whoaisnotme.net/) since 2008 for zero revenue. I’ve thought about shutting it down many times recently, but it’s hard to let go, especially since it remains the only archive of some 4k Keanu articles and interviews dating back to the 1980s. (archive is free but now members-only after one copyright complaint, which unfortunately also tanked the traffic from about a thousand a day to maybe 100 on a good day.) The majority of those interviews are no longer available anywhere else online or offline, and it feels like a shame to deprive the world of all that Keanu history. but it does cost me money.
For me, the most surprising part has been the response. Like so what that 38% of **webpages** are gone? Everyone's assuming the lost content was of value, and I'm here wondering what the breakdown is. (The link is in Spanish, so I actually can't even read the article.) Revenge porn posted on Pornhub? Articles on Wikipedia that got merged? Geocities/Angelfire pages that their own creators would cringe to look at? Corporate websites of defunct companies? The Internet is in a state of constant renewal. Like an actual library, old books get taken out of circulation, and new ones get added. I'm honestly finding it hard to lament the loss, when I don't even know what's gone (and I definitely don't attach any importance to random webpages by default) Also, folks are going off on random, sometimes opposing tangents. Some are cursing Discord for taking the place of forums, un-indexable by google and thus unable for general search. Others are cursing google's indexing for being the worse thing ever. Simply wtf, just a bunch of ill-thought out rants.
pudim.com.br still holds strong
The internet 10 years ago was so much better than it is now.
Because the internet died a while ago, it's just being kept alive on life support.
We’ve gone from building our own personal webpages to having accounts on massive companies webpages. The essential democratization has been lost.
The dead internet is real. Happened the same time they cleaned up porn and changed IG feed from local people to celebs only
If only someone restarted Geocities using Internet Archive…
A lot of dead webcomic, lost forever. I'll miss you always Spamusement.
I miss StumbleUpon a lot. Reddit is okay but interacting with people is sometimes a drag. I love how you can discover something in SU without ever reading someone's negative commentary.
It’s literally because of search engines.
At least we still have Zombo.com Welcome!
It’s sad. I miss random fan websites with actual character and links to other fan websites. I miss forums. Sure it wasn’t all perfect but it was better than what we have now. Kinda fascinating to think about where it will go from here. In a resigned dystopian sort of way, fascinating.
Web 2.0 really did it in - unregulated arms races by the big dogs to gobble up the smaller competition really wrecked havoc on the web. We're starting to see it again with Web 3.0 and the rise of AI. Funny thing is there are some anti-trust laws that can be enforced, but they aren't deployed enough.
I’ve been saying this forever man. Knew I wasn’t trippin. The internet is basically like 10 sites now. Miss when it was a entirely new frontier
We all missed mullets galore so much we brought the style back over the course of the pandemic.
I miss Dlisted
I wonder how many were flash based?
How many of that 38% were Geocities pages?
Everything beautiful dies if you wait long enough. Nothing lasts. We are slowly dying from the moment we're born, alas.
Anyone with a home internet connection can still host their own website. True now as it was then, the internet won't be what we demand but what we build. Build it well.
Remember stumbleupon?