The Internet is Disappearing

Plus other news

Hey all, Parker here.

So, let's talk about something that's been bothering me for a while: digital decay, or as it's sometimes called, "link rot." If you’ve ever clicked on a link expecting to find that crucial piece of information only to be met with a 404 error, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

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Recently, the Pew Research Center released some eye-opening findings. They found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. Yep, you read that right. Nearly two-fifths of the web’s past content has vanished into the ether. Here are a few key points from their research:

• A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.

• For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with high and low levels of site traffic are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.

• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their 'References' section that points to a page that no longer exists.

This phenomenon is a major issue. Imagine writing or referencing important work, only to have it disappear. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

Kate Lindsay wrote a great piece for her Embedded newsletter back in 2021, highlighting how the notion that "the internet is forever" is, well, kind of a myth. Sure, what you post online can (and often does) come back to haunt you, but equally, huge chunks of your life's work can just vanish. This is where backup services like the Internet Archive come in handy.