DELETE INTERNET PLEASE

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

LINK ROT: 38% webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available 10 years later.

Even among pages that existed in 2021, 22% no longer accessible just two years later. This is often because individual page was deleted or removed on otherwise functional website.

Sounds about right.

Can't stop living in the now and nothing against a decluttered internet, but I'm always surprised at the number of dead links for things obviously worth archiving, like news articles. Maybe nobody tracks those.

At least we save up precious energy and server space for our new AI overlords.

I've always been suspicious of "endless scroll" websites from an archiving point of view. They don't have individual article pages, they have a feed, which is hard to archive unless all of the scripting is archived as well. Another problem is that with post-aggregating websites, such as Reddit, there's no way to recreate what the homepage looked like on a certain day. What did the people of Reddit enjoy on 15 February 2015? Cat pictures, probably, and "today I learned that POSH stands for PORT OUT STARBOARD HOME". But it's lost to time.

The same problem still happens with anything that requires a bit more space, such as video. Older Linux distributions, mirrors of CD-ROMs, or anything greater than 100mb or so isn't easily archived.

I was drawn to this because I have an album, One Touch Button Music, by Benfay, that was only ever released digitally, back in 2004. It's widely available on the internet archive and elsewhere, but there was a remix album as well, and the first track on that seems to be completely lost to time. No-one ever uploaded it to Youtube, the label is dead and gone, it hasn't been archived. There's a museum of lost media wiki that tracks this kind of thing, and an awful lot of peripheral media has been lost.

Which reminds me that the AV Club ran a series of odd cover versions of songs a while back. I remember Lake Street Dive doing a trumpet-led cover of "Take On Me". But presumably because the website was bought by Kinja and the rights expired it was all junked. There are re-uploads, but the quality isn't as good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GehZrO8pxhU

But what I was actually going to say is that in a fortnight I have a holiday. I'm going to Geneva. I was going to visit Cern and buy a Cern hat. Then I will be able to look London in the eye. There's also a building where Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. It's a college campus, and even when I was a student I didn't look like a student, but I wonder what would happen if I snuck in and turned the computer off. I bet some of the students there have thought about it.

XP - Ashley, Soulseek has two instances of this track - Elfenblond (Mikkel Metal Remix), one is locked/unshared and the other is from a folder that says 'radio rips' and appears to be part of a mix

Which reminds me that the AV Club ran a series of odd cover versions of songs a while back. I remember Lake Street Dive doing a trumpet-led cover of "Take On Me"

The Wye Oak version of "We Belong" is charming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDSxQTFFhYY

I see a bunch of those AV Undercover videos on the AV Club's YouTube channel, including the Lake Street Dive "Take on Me" cover.

kinda baffled how these cover song clips.. aww nevermind