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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

I think the Stack Overflow guidelines have "solved" this problem in about the cleanest way currently possible: expect links to die, and include the relevant information in your answer.

If the link still works when it gets clicked on that's a bonus, but it shouldn't need to be available for the content you're reading to be understandable.

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And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives.

Will you still be allowed to do that in ten years? Or will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift?

> And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives.

I guess paraphrasing or summarising hasn’t been prohibited.

> will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift?

Shifting to prarphrasing or to summarising doesn’t sound too bad.

That's not always possible without changing the subtleties and basic meaning, or even intention as well as discussing and questionioning what the author wanted to say with their sentence or paragraph. This is particularly tricky if you write political commentary on your site. Blog post of a politician or social media posts can't be quoted where there's already vaguely stated and often said politician removes the post after backlash so you wouldn't be able to link it.

In the case of StackOverflow, if you can’t explain an answer in your own words, then you don’t really know the answer and no one should rely on your links to a supposedly authoritative source.

And there's also the HTTP 300 codes if content has been moved.

These work only if you move stuff around on the same website. If you switch domains you can't just ask the new domain owner to redirect requests to your new website.

When a website disappears completely, there is no web server to respond with HTTP 300.

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