How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?
During the recent successful search, the searchers trawled 4chan archives for early-2010s posts with similar image metadata to the 2018 Backrooms image copy. These archives were missing the original image files and thumbnails, but still retained some image metadata that could be filtered on (dimensions, image file md5s etc.) One of the searchers came up with a list of posts which might have originally included the image file, based on image metadata and context. Another searcher plugged the image md5 of one of these candidate posts (an April 2011 post recently added to an archive) into other archives, and hit on a post with a thumbnail matching the original Backrooms image from March 2011. At this point they'd finally found an earlier copy of the image, after years of searching.
Soon after, one of the searchers plugged the filename of the March 2011 post into Twitter's search, and came up with a post from 2019 which included the physical address and a link to the image source (this Twitter user had already found the source before the search had really begun, but it had gone unremarked upon at the time). The website had been replaced with blogspam in the interim. A searcher plugged this domain into waybackmachine and found a page with the image and a full explanation (it was taken during the renovation of a commercial property in Wisconsin).
Post from one of the searchers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/backrooms/comments/1d3pkif/how_the_...
Sorry I didn’t archive this but should be in the history.
That said I know many here have an involuntary eye spasm episode with Elon being mentioned but not sure IA does so not sure I agree with the original accusation.
In fact they say For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”. That doesn't sound like "we solved it!".
Instead, they're using this to highlight how vital archives are. It's a valid point, and there's nothing I see wrong with it.
I read about the whole thing last week at 404media, via waxy blog, which is a much more comprehensive article: https://archive.is/sj846
They even say
Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being “found” travels throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged. For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”.
How is that taking credit?
As has been pointed out though, IA has a pretty tenuous relationship with the Musk/chan adjacent parts of the internet, so it doesn’t surprise me they deliberately left those facts out.
From other comments in this thread, it looks like some guy on X solved it in 2018, yet others had no idea, and solved it independently too.
How many others "solved it"? Where is the official record of this? Who really was first? Did someone solve it before 2018? Did more than one party solve it, independently, recently?
Trying to untangle that and be sure, isn't simple.
They covered this by saying many eyeballs solved it, and then went on to their key message, highlighting the importance of archives, and showing how their archive proves the solution is correct.
My point is, pointing an accusatory finger at them, and saying they are trying to take credit is not fair.
Of course this is not going to happen with the current resources of the IA and if it did it would probably just result in them getting hammered with DMCA requests and other legal demands for content that the "owners" didn't even know was on the archive.