Link Rot is Real
38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
We're losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?
Historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days.1
FULL Report: “When Online Content Disappears” -Pew Research Center, May 2024.
Pew Research Center conducted the analysis to examine how often online content that once existed becomes inaccessible. One part of the study looks at a representative sample of webpages that existed over the past decade to see how many are still accessible today.
Loss of information, the power of links, the degradation of the internet and data, Link Rot.
1
Chris Stokel-Walker, We're losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it? BBC 9/16/2024
And we are living in an age when people are ready to do away with libraries because:"Everything in on the internet."
I've found this disturbing for as long as internet pages have been disappearing. The Internet Archive's "Way Back Machine" is a godsend, but it's limited in many ways.