Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

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• Hacker News
• 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..

  by Razengan
• 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 When I checked them again in 2024, more than HALF were gone, but (praise be to Kahle) all had been archived.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.

  by theodric
• Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?
  by david_shi
• Surprisingly has not burned out or faded away.
  by pigeons
• 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.

  by zerobees
• 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".

  by userbinator
• 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.

  by CalRobert
• "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
  by timbit42
• 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.
  by phendrenad2
• > 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.

  by zrn900
• 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.

  by vbernat
• 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.

  by badlibrarian
• 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.

  by jjav
• Vanishing culture is the default, and not just on the internet, but for all time.
  by SubiculumCode
• 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.
  by vbernat
• 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.

  by sph
• 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….

  by conception
• 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.
  by SubiculumCode
• You could ask on Retrocomputing Stack Exchange. These question are on-topic: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/tags/identify-this-....
  by wizzwizz4
• 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.
  by Venn1
• 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.
  by SecretDreams
• 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...

  by johnea
• 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.

  by com2kid
• This is, in effect, the entirety of human history though. 99.9999% of our collective cultures and behaviors disappear into the aether
  by homeonthemtn
• 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

  by badlibrarian
• 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.

  by hombre_fatal
• "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...

  by badlibrarian
• 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...

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

  wtf

  by NooneAtAll3
• 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
  by ce4