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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.

I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.

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It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.

We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing.

Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.

> We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing.

No, we hot-linked all those image hosts because we didn't want to pay to host it ourselves.

...and I had fun replacing images people directly linked from my server with less-- ahem-- savory images.

I enjoyed the emails I got from a couple people who were adamant I "hacked" their site because their "web developer" linked to images on my server... images that now said stuff like "I'm a loser bandwidth thief!", etc. (I never did use really nasty "shock" images-- just taunting stuff.)

Even Archive.org is rather limited in what it keeps. I know of a very large site that recently disappeared. archive only has part of the web html part of the site. Everything else is either gone or non accessible.

That's not my experience

There needs to be some kind of "murphy's law" for this style of comment. "For any comment on the internet where someone points out an issue they've encountered with technology, there will inevitably be a reply from someone else sharing that they haven't personally experienced it."

I think you get to coin it.

s'-0_0-'s law

Most of the time it isnt mine either. But here and there there will be large swaths of some site that are just not archived. At one point if someone put up a robots text file history would just vanish. Have not checked lately if that still holds. But one company I worked for was just 'gone'. Because a webpage squatter put up a robots.txt.

> It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.

This is a bit idealized. In practice copying data is not quite accurate (especially in bulk) and bit-rot is a very real phenomenon, both in flight and in storage.

You sometimes encounter it when dealing with files from the early '00s, it's very common to discover a few of them are corrupt, even if they've only ever been copied between harddrives.

Content-addressed storage and error correcting codes mean that one can make bitrot astronomically unlikely with honestly minimal infra investment.

It's copyright that causes anything to disappear from the web IMO -- torrents never die.

EDIT: I am aware that unseeded torrents do in fact die. But it really doesn't take much to seed a whole hard drive's worth of rarely requested data -- this also detects bitrot and so corrects errors automatically if you're not the only copy.

If you are, there's ECC, as well as making another copy.

There are mitigations in both software and hardware, but most consumer machines, by default, do almost none of that. No ECC RAM, no error correction in the filesystem.

Digital Data https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

There are many TinyMUD logs that were posted on Usenet, still to be found on Google Groups.

However, logging was controversial amongst mudders. It was almost always rude to log a private conversation without knowledge or consent; it was tacky to indiscriminately log while everyone was in the "hangout room" or Rec Room, as it were, and it was also bad form to post logs to Usenet or share them without redacting player names and other things.

But logging was built-in to most clients, and it was possible for server administrators to log (and hypothetically any malware-in-the-middle could log the cleartext, unencrypted TinyMUD TCP streams.) And many nefarious deeds by nasty players were exposed to the light when their logs were posted.

The technology is still in its infancy unfortunately, so there's no way the web could have been based on it, but I think content-addressing is the long-term play. If I click a link, there are some cases where I want the server to respond with a fresh response just for me (e.g. a website showing the weather). But often I just want whatever content was linked to (e.g. a webpage explaining a math content). In the latter case, it would be nice if the link had a hash of the content in it, and 3rd parties could host copies to keep the link working even if the original operator stopped existing.

That's pretty much how IPFS works.

Did they ever solve the problem where requesting a file took ten minutes

There are probably mitigations they could come up with, but variable latency in actually obtaining files seems like it may be an inherent characteristic of requesting data by content hashes rather than specific locations.

Sounds like Hyphanet (aka Freenet).

But who would? Anyone can run an archive.org style site but it takes a lot of work and money, so hardly anyone does. Not even Google does that anymore.

It's pretty difficult to avoid without very significant tradeoffs, though. The closest is content-addressable peer-to-peer networks, but these still rely on someone keeping the information around, and they struggle to scale anywhere near as much.

> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.

Let me introduce you to the alternatives: print media, film, stone engravings. That stuff tends to get burned and shattered and it takes FOREVER to make copies.

I'm being cheeky but I don't know what design change you could possible make to the web to make webpages not die.

Ban JavaScript from making requests. Then save-as will work again.

> Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.

I'd say it's one of the biggest design flaws of the current web, what with more and more content hidden behind paywalls, increasingly restricted WAFs, and rendered client-side via convoluted JavaScript.

Archiving and mirroring of old-style websites, delivered as static HTML, is simple and straightforward. 20 years from now, most web content from ~1996 to ~2015 will still be accessible, but much of today's web content probably won't.

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