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posted by janrinok on Tuesday January 30 2024, @06:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-net-never-forgets-ha dept.

Web developer Trevor Morris has a short post on the attrition of web sites over the years.

I have run the Laravel Artisan command I built to get statistics on my outgoing links section. Exactly one year later it doesn't make good reading.

[...] The percentage of total broken links has increased from 32.8% last year to 35.7% this year. Links from over a decade ago have a fifty per cent chance of no longer working. Thankfully, only three out of over 550 have gone missing in the last few years of links, but only time will tell how long they'll stick around.

As pointed out in the early and mid 1990s, the inherent centralization of sites, later web sites, is the basis for this weakness. That is to say one single copy exists which resides under the control of the publisher / maintainer. When that one copy goes, it is gone.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2024, @10:58AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2024, @10:58AM (#1342487)

    That is to say one single copy exists which resides under the control of the publisher / maintainer.

    Should I invite others to maintain my personal site or what?

  • (Score: 4, Touché) by canopic jug on Wednesday January 31 2024, @12:08PM (1 child)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 31 2024, @12:08PM (#1342493) Journal

    You miss the point, perhaps on purpose. With paper-based publishing, the recipients received a copy over which they could decide on many factors including how long to keep it around for. You don't get that choice with browsers. And there is nothing approaching an archive (very long term caching) or library (medium term caching) except for the Internet Archive, and even that is centralized. Furthermore, it is under constant legal attack to drag it down and remove old material forever from the public.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2024, @06:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2024, @06:22PM (#1342535)

      In case you are still here...

      > or library (medium term caching) except for the Internet Archive

      There are many other archive sites now, archive.is is one I've used. Seems to have good coverage for news articles about current events (which might be behind a paywall).