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Comment by krallja | Hacker News Reader

The Million Dollar Homepage is not decaying (it is still serving its million dollar purpose) - it is the Web itself that has decayed. The brittleness of URIs is on full display. "Cool URLs don't change," but most of these URLs were never cool: they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.

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It's a frame of reference problem. Note that this article is published by a library research group. One of the hottest topics in library science is how to archive and reference the WWW. While it's entirely valid to view the Million Dollar Web Page as a decaying artifact (let's call this the Art Critic view), it is also possible to view it as an archaeological record that needs its links to be complete (let's call this the archaeologist view).

Librarians are always worried about preserving garbage, which is what the Million Dollar Web Page is. Now before you downvote me, bear in mind I did Information Science in grad school, so I hung around with a lot of librarians. I know the librarian hoarder mindset pretty well.

The point I'm trying to make is that the Internet is a different kind of thing than a library, it is more dynamic (which is good and bad) and generally a more living and lived-in type of medium. MDH was a money making scheme. Clever? Maybe. Intended to be long-lasting? Doubtful.

It's a cool article, nonetheless.

Same as if I drive down a street ten years later... I can't expect the street to be a time-capsule to mt memories.

Old buildings stand until they decay or we run out of space nearby and demolish them. HTML doesn't decay and we can't run out of URLs; web pages only disappear because our hosting infrastructure needlessly demands ongoing payment from (only!) the author.

I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed cost that isn't much more than the first few years.

For MillionDollarHomepage.com 90% of these links are clickbait banner ads for scams; the underlying link is often controlled by a middle-man, redirecting to a site of the buyer’s choosing.

So, on the other hand, if someone isn't willing to sponsor the cheap cost of hosting a site, maybe that site and its content isn't worth preserving?

This really bothers me about the state of webhosting. Trying to host your own stuff always feels so ephemeral because of monthly payment schemes and the need for maintenance. But the alternative of ad supported services like Facebook are fundamentally anti-user and evil by nature.

Im really wishing for one of the big cloud providers to offer a one time payment guarenteed for life "digital locker". A single e2e encrypted service to store my digital assets. Essentially an online scrapbook that you could add to and journal your whole life in without any prying eyes or advertisement.

Yes! One time payment for life storage is a great idea. I would also want to be able to serve some content publicly for ~100 years, so that it would be accessible even after my death. I called it the 'Century Archive' and wanted to price forever storage at $1/MB (for design as well as economic reasons).

> I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed cost that isn't much more than the first few years.

As someone who's been involved in internet hosting since the days of dial-up, that's just not true. Or rather, it's not the whole picture. Hardware breaks and becomes unsupported. Dynamic pages run on software that rots. Is a hosting provider expected to still support pages that run on SSI, CGI with Perl that requires libraries that haven't been updated in 15 years and are full of security holes?

Who's going to pay to move websites to new hardware? For the trouble of ensuring backups are working properly? For reacting to legal problems?

Hosting involves a lot more than sticking a .html page behind an internet connection. Software rots. Webpages rot. Someone has to be paid to provide upkeep.

The "future" of the web has become Google as the URL and address bar and Facebook has become the content.

>they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.

They drank the Cool-Aid, so to speak.

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