However, the tumblr’s about page reveals a deeper mission: User’s content and purchasing decisions are even more fragile in the internet age. Nest can discontinue its smart home hub device, rendering it useless (This is still a problem even if Nest later discontinued the CEO who made the decision). Websites can shut down with no warning, dumping any information that didn’t happen to be documented by the Internet Archive. But is the problem that bad? But this site also asks broader questions: Is this the best way to structure and grow businesses? Is this the best long-term model for keeping people interested in making and doing amazing things on the internet? Why does almost no website or online service (my own included) have a plan for what happens to their users’ content over the long term?”
The Problem Is Bad
To me, and many tech-savvy people, the internet can seem like a safe, reliable way to back up anything. Unlike the real world, files will never age on the internet. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be there forever, or even three years later. Researchers Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson, of Old Dominion University, Virginia, conducted a 2012 study into the amount of internet resources lost to time, and how quickly they were lost. They collected data on six events between June 2009 and March 2012: “the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death, the Iranian elections and protests, Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Egyptian revolution, and the Syrian uprising.” The results proved that a large chunk of the internet (containing facts about meaningful historical events) vanished soon after it was posted: Imagine if your public library had an annual purge in which they took one tenth of all their books and threw them in a bonfire.
At Least We Have Some Sites to Deal With It
The ultimate problem is inescapable: The internet will never last as long as we want it to. One 2015 Atlantic article addressed this problem, centering its tale on the story of a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism that vanished from the internet after its paper folded, and found no solution either. It quoted Jason Scott, archivist and historian for the Internet Archive, who has had plenty of time to reflect on the situation: The Internet Archive is fighting the good fight. So is the Lost Media Wiki and /r/ObscureMedia/, collections of long-lost TV shows and media, most of which is horrifyingly bad. But even these won’t last forever. And hard drives can be corrupted. The last time period to come up with a truly durable media format may have been the Stone Age. At least Stonehenge still exists. H/T Y Combinator
