The Chinese Internet is collapsing at an accelerated pace

PRC net portal + censorship uniquely prone to link rot. Which TBF also effects western net. If only something like distributed Microsoft Recall was around earlier to backup content on peer networks, but then again, 90% of the torrents out there dont' work anymore either. One would hope some gov agency out there with bottomless budget has an archive of domestic content for... reference purposes. But also only matter of time before Microsoft / whatever OS owners with in post Recall world realizing they have screenshots and metadata to all the content and become information brokers.

This is in the Chinese language.

Is this some kind of joke?

The truth is, for most of the Chinese media products now, e.g. Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Toutiao they DO NOT allow these search engines to index their content.

Even for this post which was originally published in WeChat, you cannot search it directly from Baidu or Google.

These companies are trying to keep users inside their ecosystem, that's why you can hardly find anything from Baidu now.

I know a lot of people would prefer the answer "censorship", but the method of this investigation is just like using Google Trend of "Obama" to indicate that US Internet is collapsing.

Traditional way of propaganda.

Continued from previous comment. Translated bt DeepL free web version.

5

If something is important to us and it is dying, is there anything we can do to save it?

Some people have made such an attempt. In the United States, there is a website called "Internet Archive", which is translated into Chinese as "互联网档案馆", and it has preserved a lot of original web pages. But I have tried, the original Chinese web pages, save very little, and the use of very troublesome, search function is very primitive and inefficient, and did not save almost.

From a technical point of view, to save all the web pages from China's Internet to the rise of the mobile Internet in the past ten years or so, it should not be difficult, the cost is not high, after all, compared to the current video era, the original Internet pages of those graphics, occupying a space that is almost negligible.

The question is, who is going to do it, and what is the motivation?

Commercial organizations won't do it. Because there is no commercial interest.

The government might be able to build an archive that preserves all the web pages, just like a library or a museum. But why would the government spend the money and effort to do this? There seems to be no reason other than preserving history. Besides, even if the Government did this, it would not make any sense to ordinary Internet users because this archive would certainly require certain log-in privileges to avoid misuse of information.

Moreover, even if an organization is willing to do this, it is too late now. After the rise of the mobile Internet, the Chinese content of the traditional Internet has almost disappeared. By rough estimation, more than 99% of it should be gone.

In a sense, the series of articles written by Hejiayan has also contributed to the preservation of the history of the existence of these cow people. If I hadn't written about them, a lot of that history would have been lost online. But after all, this is not the original information, it is only the second-hand information that I have consolidated.

Nowadays, on the Chinese Internet, all the major events that happened in the first decade of this century, all the celebrities who have left deep traces, the information that can still be found is almost all the second-hand information edited by the self-media, or even information that has been passed on many times, and has long been completely changed.

The original reports about them are gone, the original videos are gone, the original speeches are gone, the original netizen sightings are gone, the original comments are gone ......

In some years, all this second-hand and N-hand information, too, will be gone. It's as if those events never happened and those people never existed.

There is nothing more we can do but accept the reality.

In the future Internet era, looking back at the first twenty years of the 21st century will be twenty years without historical records.

We are the disappearing generation of the Internet age.

If you can still see some ancient information of Chinese Internet now, it is just the last afterglow of the sunset.

If you understand their fleeting nature, you may sigh like Faust on his deathbed:

You're so beautiful, please linger.

But that afterglow will soon be swallowed up by the two-way foil of time and fall into the void, along with your exclamation.

In Three Bodies, Cheng Xin and Ai AA are still lucky enough to escape the two-dimensionalizing solar system in the only curvature ship they have.

We, on the other hand, don't even have a curvature ship.

There is no escape.

Almost everything you see and create now, along with this article, this platform, will eventually drown in the void as well.

End

PS: Follow He Plus Salt and check out this public number for previous cowriter articles, and maybe you'll see a lot of information that has disappeared elsewhere. I will also continue to work hard to continue to write good cattleman stories, and strive to retain as much light as possible in the afterglow of the setting sun.

(Translated using DeepL free version)

(Translation by DeepL free web version)

Chinese Internet is accelerating the collapse Original Hejiaoyan Hejiaoyan 2024-05-22 07:42 Guangdong

1

Let me ask you a small question:

If we search on Baidu "Ma Yun" two words, set the time in 1998 to 2005, can search out the information, about how many? Is it 100 million, or 10 million, or 1 million?

I have asked in several groups and the general guess is that it should be at the level of millions or tens of millions. After all, the Internet information is so vast. Jack Ma, as the stormy entrepreneur of that era, must have left a lot of traces on the Internet.

But the full results that can actually be searched are as follows:

With Baidu search, selected date range for "May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005", containing information on Ma Yun, a total of 1 (May 22, 2024 data).

The only information is also false. Clicking on it reveals that the article was actually published in 2021, which is not part of the time period limited above, it's just that somehow it was inexplicably searched for.

In other words, if we want to know about Jack Ma's experiences, reports, people's discussions about him, his speeches, the company's history, and so on during that period of time, the amount of valid raw information we can get, is zero.

You may think, is this a problem with Baidu? If you change Bing or Google, will you be able to search it?

I tested, these two sites search out valid information, and Baidu is not much different than Baidu, slightly more than Baidu, but only single-digit. More are also time disordered invalid information, only do not know what technical reasons, was wrongly crawled out.

You might also wonder if it's because Jack Ma is one of the more controversial people out there, and for some indescribable reason his information is unsearchable?

But in fact, not only the case of Jack Ma, we go to search Ma Huateng, Lei Jun, Ren Zhengfei, and so on, and even Luo Yonghao and Sister Fu Rong, such as at that time the red hot netizens, or Jay Chou, Li Yuchun, such as the stars of the past fire all over the network, the results are the same. Such as the case of searching Lei Jun, the results are like this:

After testing different websites, different people's names, and different time periods, I found a shocking phenomenon:

Almost all in that era had a red-hot Chinese sites, such as NetEase, Sohu, campus BBS, Xizihutong, Kaidi cat eye, Tianya Forum, school network (RenRen), Sina blogs, Baidu posting, as well as a large number of personal Web sites, etc., in a certain number of years before the information has completely disappeared, and even most of the site is all the years of the information has disappeared. The only exception is Sina.com, where you can still find some information from more than ten years ago, but only a very few, and more than 99.9999% of the other content, all disappeared.

We don't realize a serious problem: the Chinese Internet is rapidly collapsing, and the Chinese Internet content before the emergence of mobile Internet has almost disappeared.

We originally thought that the Internet has a memory, but we didn't realize that this memory, it turned out to be a memory like a goldfish.