Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web | Hacker News Reader

Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

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125 pointswslh49 comments

There was a website that I had quoted a long time ago. The author said something like "when the robots are taking over the world, don't panic. Buy a robot." I loved it. So I linked to it on my old blog. Then years later, I went to the source only to find that the page returned a 404. So I linked to the wayback machine instead. But then, it was removed from the archive.org. I can't even remember the name of the website at this point, just that it had the word "café" in it.

Anyway, all this to say that since there are no sources for this quote, then I'm the new original source. You can quote me on that.

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/117370206/You-made-thisI-m...

I have seen "That which does not kill us, has made its last mistake" Attributed to myself, through a similar process.

I think I had it in my Usenet sig for a while,and eventually they became the oldest records people could find of it.

> But then, it was removed from the archive.org

wtf

EzBoard used to be on Archive.org, then they nuked the whole thing.

I know I'm not crazy. Someone else mentioned this as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/uxojh5/ezboard...

Edit: wait, it's back now? I need to go look up the old communities I used to be in .

https://forums.mfgg.net/thread-2932.html

Websites can request to be removed. The data is still kept though

Many of my old bookmarked urls have been removed from IA. Strangely, it's only some versions. If you go back through old twitter urls, for instance.

Maybe your own site from when the link was present has been archived by the Internet Archive. I'd give it a try, maybe you can recover that link at least

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead, replied:

"We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

Long ago in Seattle there was a network of BBSs and the head board was called Rat City. They had a lot of work by local artists (mostly tracker files and digital artwork IIRC).

I have not been able to find a single hint of their existence. Everything about what was once a collection of artistic works, wiped from the earth.

We really need to do a better job managing our historical legacy.

I used to google my unique internet aliases from my preteen/teenage years and find a trove of my posts across forums and websites.

In my mid 20s I’d remember to do it especially when stoned for that nostalgia hit but also for that sentimental hit you feel when viewing your younger self’s writings.

Those same google searches two decades later have almost zero results. All the forums and websites are dead except a few odd ends like Newgrounds and WickedFire.

Wish I saved them when I had the chance.

All I get are copied and pasted yahoo answers. Only a few , well one forum remains.

I've been in using the same alias since 1995. (COM port 2, where modems used to be at)

My pre Internet alias was comkid but that was super common online and not available when I first signed to for AOL back in 1995!

On the other hand, when I was a teenager, some friends posted content referring to me with pictures on a popular local platform at the time.

I either lost contact with those friends or they lost access to their account, so I tried multiple times to get the platform to remove the content about me, they wouldn't do it, despite all the proofs I could provide them with.

The day I heard that they were finally going out of business was quite a relief.

But contrary to you I made copies of this content, part of it during my attempts to get the platform taking it down...

From http://bbslist.textfiles.com/

Perhaps Dude is among us.

  206-246-6647
  White Center, VA RaT City BBS
  (1993-1997) Dude Renegade
  "Primarily a demoscene board with a vast collection of Impulse Tracker music and ANSI art. 
  Used to meet IRL at Seattle Center to take field recordings for use as samples. 
  Members included Dude, Catspaw, Geo, and Infamouse." - Dude

And abides.

This is, in effect, the entirety of human history though. 99.9999% of our collective cultures and behaviors disappear into the aether

In modern times, archive.org is an international treasure.

Which of course means it's facing major opposition from capital interests.

Apparently no one ever thought an incoming presidential administration would literally wipe gigabytes of government funded research results off the web.

Now we see in bold type how precarious is our democracy...

Anyone in their late 30s or early 40s should be grateful. We got to be stupid teenagers on the internet without any of it going on our permanent record.

That was the golden age of the internet. What followed was the total enshitification. Now, I barely use the internet. As a kid I could get lost on it for hours, there was so much discovery. This was before every link tried to sell you something or steal your information from you.

Being a nerd growing up in a rural area with access to the internet was a godsend to my teenaged years over the 1990s. So much discovery and fun. Video games weren't uber-competitive, yet. The early 1990s was amazing as most of the pre-commercial web was geeks with special interests, college kids, and nerds (including JWZ's proto-blog). My god, there were people like me out there! And they were grown up and living good lives!

There was bad/terrible stuff on the internet, too. For several years in the mid-to-late 1990s, the top IRC channels listed in alphabetical order were CSAM listings prefaced with special characters (eg 11111111!!!!!terriblechannelname). You'd eventually stumble onto some racist pages and, tame by modern standards, pornography. But it wasn't part of any organized corporate or nation-state agenda. Nowadays the internet feels like a tourist-trap where everybody is trying to take advantage of or sucker you.

This brought up an inadvertent benchmark I accidentally made between the big three AIs. I had them all research an old BBS i used to use, hunting for a DOOR game i played on it. I gave details about the bbs that i could remember and a pretty well defined description of the game and threw it at the deep researchers to see what they could fine.

ChatGPT gave me about a ten page report on who ran the bbs and the name of the game. When I looked into it the game was totally different and the guy named had nothing to do with the bbs. “Since these were both popular items at the time, I just inferred.” But it had fabricated the entire report. Nothing in it was true.

Gemini did the same thing but the report was about twenty pages. 100% hallucinated.

Claude said it couldn’t find any information.

Best advertisement I’ve ever lived.

I still hunt for the door game today….

The research reports can be useful where there is a lot of information, but they'll straight up couch the lack of information with phrases like "emerging trends" while rephrasing a hypothesis as evidence.

You could ask on Retrocomputing Stack Exchange. These question are on-topic: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/tags/identify-this-....

I’ll give it a shot!

I often run a linkchecker on my blog and substitute broken URL with links to the Wayback machine. Unfortunately, this is becoming quite difficult to detect broken URL as everybody is fighting bots. I am using linkchecker <https://github.com/linkchecker/linkchecker/> and it respects robots.txt but many sites are now serving 503 or various other codes.

I built a commercial link checker SaaS and this was one of the reason I decided to abandon the endeavour. Had plenty of customers complaining that some links had 403 or similar errors, when in reality it's because of Cloudflare. If you add heuristics to ignore Cloudflare's errors, your link checker is pretty much useless as CF is in front of every bloody website on the internet nowadays.

You can't win. Also I learned that people and companies don't really care if their links break, let alone pay for a link checker service. I am guilty of this on my personal website.

I don't think CF is that much present, but yes, the situation is dire.

Well, I disagree and I have seen the data.

It's easy to disprove. This website is not behind CF. Also: https://backlinko.com/cloudflare-users.

Vanishing culture is the default, and not just on the internet, but for all time.

I'll take a contrarian view and probably get downvoted for it, but many people are adamant about the benefits of indiscriminate archiving, and I just don't see it. Do we have a moral right to keep a copy of everything that's ever been written on the internet, basically just for the sake of it?

Sure, there's a variety of official and quasi-officials resources that should be treated as public record and preserved. And arguably, there are things that rise to the level of a cultural phenomenon and where the benefit of keeping receipts outweighs the jerk factor of never asking for permission and not respecting the wishes of private individuals.

But if it's some family blog from 30 years ago that's been deliberately taken down and lives on archive.org unbeknownst to the original owner? Do we have a right to that? To what end, other than "well, future historians may need it"? A historian won't look at it. A person trying to doxx you or shame you will.

That's a good point, and AI makes this worse unfortunately. I realized a while ago I spend more time taking pictures than I even do looking at them, and quit worrying so much about saving everything. As they say, all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. On the other hand, it's a memory of an internet that no longer exists, and that I think a lot of people (myself included) miss dearly.

I do suspect a lot of things weren't deliberately taken down so much as just not maintained, though.

Archives have not taken a consistent stance on this. Preservation, removal, restricted access, de-indexing, and “right to be forgotten” sit on a spectrum.

Good archival practice has to include judgment, context, and humility.

Sometimes that means preserving. Sometimes it means limiting access. And sometimes it may mean "honoring" a removal request or court order, even if you're just setting a flag.

In the pre-digital era, the norm was that content was preserved. Simply because it was printed in newspapers, magazines, books, alsbums, etc.. in thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of copies, so merely by inertia, many copies survived squirreled away in libraries, attics and other storage.

Also, once printed and distributed, it couldn't be taken back and altered since countless original copies existed.

Sure, a lot of it wasn't that important, but only in hindsight of history does it become apparent what was important. So it was possible to go back and research those old unaltered originals.

I fear for history in the digital era. Everything is fleeting, everything is erased and everything can be retroactively altered when the powers-that-be don't like what was said. Thinking centuries ahead, reliable historical records basically stop around 2000-2020 or so.

> In the pre-digital era, the norm was that content was preserved.

So pre-digital, no books, publications, photographic prints, scrolls, tablets, or clay etchings we lost to time?

> Thinking centuries ahead, reliable historical records basically stop around 2000-2020 or so.

That’s basically backwards.

We’re making a stink because people are identifying one needle in a giant pile of needles that they can’t find anymore.

And people point to thousand-year old physical writings that persist, because they persist, and don’t know what was lost because it was lost.

Digital records are far far more long-lived — in the statistical average — than physical.

I'm not sure I've read anything more wrong on Hacker News than this post.

> So pre-digital, no books, publications, photographic prints, scrolls, tablets, or clay etchings we lost to time?

That is already answered in prior post.

> Digital records are far far more long-lived — in the statistical average — than physical.

Obviously that can't be known, simply because the data does not exist yet.

There does not exist any digital data older than a hundred years, let alone a thousand. Will anything digital survive that long? Well, we don't know, come back in a thousand years to see.

So far, the odds are stacked against it. Try to find just some tapes from the 70s to read, and you won't find much. And that's just ~50 years, a blink of an eye in terms of history. Meanwhile my magazine collection and photographs from the 70s are mostly as good as new, as usable today as back then.

History is not only what "official" resources want you to believe.

Those who want a "right to be forgotten" are really advocating for the "right to rewrite history".

I have also restored the very first articles I wrote in the 90s when I was young <https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-old-web-articles>. At the time, they were not "great," but now I think they have some limited historical values. For example, one of them is about how the national phone operator was billing minutes. The information was easy to find in the past but is pretty scarce now.

I didn't use the wayback machine because it didn't archive everything I needed and because I still had the files on my hard drive, but if I didn't, I would have been happy to recover them.

I agree, indiscriminate archival is doomed to fail. Spending all of your resources backing things up leaves you with no resources to curate. This is where archive.org goes wrong I think. I think identifying information that is valuable and distilling, reformatting, and republishing it is much more important.

The problem is, some information is interesting only to a tiny audience long after the fact, so there's no chance anyone would've thought to curate it in the moment. E.g., for a few of my projects I like to dig up old versions of niche libraries to observe how their behavior has changed. But for most traditional distribution methods (putting the tarball up on your website or on a SourceForge-style website), the common assumption is that no one wants old broken versions, so you can regularly wipe everything but the last 1-3 versions to reduce clutter: the consequence is that the old versions accidentally saved on archive.org may be the only copies left anywhere. The more recent practice of publishing Git repos has considerably improved this situation.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

> To what end, other than "well, future historians may need it"?

Future historians ! will ! need it. Today we learn the most about past civilizations from what the ordinary people left behind.

Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?

Surprisingly has not burned out or faded away.

Similarly the man who hoped he’d die before he got old, did not.

There's a recording of Nirvana playing Baba O'Riley where Kurt Cobain says "I hope I die before I turn into Pete Townsend"

Just yesterday after seeing a post on HN about "Half baked product" and it reminded me of halfbakery.com

And it's still around! 27 years!! and doesn't seem to be enshittified..

I had a collection of DEC LSI-11 technical/troubleshooting links captured in 2021 when I last was working on a young PDP. When I checked them again in 2024, more than HALF were gone, but (praise be to Kahle) all had been archived.

The saying goes: "when an old man dies, a library burns." Doubly so when his heirs don't pay the hosting bill. The boomers and previous were great at writing things down, but we're rapidly losing them.

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