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Comment by z_rho_one | Hacker News Reader

Remember the good ol' days when we all thought that everything on the web would exist for eternity and over.

I remember the naive implication/expectation that a URL would be permanent. That once a file is identified by its URL, you could bookmark it and it would always be there. And absolute worst case, if someone really, really, really had to change a file's URL, they would politely return 301 Moved Permanently, and feel very bad about it.

Now people don't give a shit about URLs. Webmasters casually move files around all the time because they feel like it, and if links get broken, who cares, that's the referring site's problem! Their beautiful file hierarchy is more important than the web staying connected!

"Webmasters" - now there's a term I haven't heard since 1998!

It's been 40 years. Half the webmasters are dead. You can't keep things alive longer than yourself.

No, that's just embarrassing stuff. That stays on the web forever.

Yep, it's Murphy's law of online content. Anything you want to reference later will be gone, with no archive copies. Anything you want deleted will be available forever.

Interesting blog post comparing the culture and incentives of CEOs in different countries? Completely gone, tried to search it up multiple times to no avail. It's barely 3 years old.

That random 20 year old video of some middle schoolers doing a flying kick and breaking a vending machine? Yeah, just popped up on my feed yesterday.

Especially since the Internet is literally a _messaging_ protocol.

And then Yahoo shut down Geocities and fought archivers and then shut down Yahoo Groups and fought archivers

It seemed reasonable, because keeping things up on the internet was becoming cheaper. We failed to see that capitalism would even demand payment for such trivial things.

I mean, it does usually, just not always in its original location.

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