We’ve all heard it before, “Be careful what you post, because once it’s on the internet, it’s on there for good.” The idea that the internet has become a permanent storage of information, one which will contain its contents across generations of humans has been constantly pressed on us since elementary school. In fact, a non-trivial portion of our classes this semester were dedicated to understanding the consequences of what we post on the internet, and how the content’s permanence can have negative and positive influences on our lives. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this has started getting further and further from the truth of the situation.
Larger and larger portions of the internet have become impossible to archive or scrape, and current, long standing archives of old, internet content have started to rapidly degrade due to dead and dying links to other media. It’s extremely common to stumble upon an old internet forum when searching for more esoteric information, only to find the only search result contains a series of dead image links with an insulting ‘missing image’ embed in their place:
Archival websites like Wayback Machine used to be a reliable way to access content that no longer exists, however modern web practices have rendered it useless by locking said content behind javascript requests to servers that may no longer be operating. A key example of this is how Instagram locked old pages behind a login prompt, resulting in it being impossible to navigate through archived account pages:
It’s easy to imagine content on the internet will persist forever without any effort on our parts. Unfortunately, preserving content, even on something as viral as the cloud, requires active work on every single developer, moderator, and user’s part. It’s important to take into consideration whether or not a feature will make a page harder to archive, as oftentimes once these links are dead, the content they hold is gone for good.
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I do think that data on the internet is truly permanent. I believe this to be true because of the fact that someone out there can always keep a copy of what you post or what someone else will post. This makes me and many others out there be super careful in the fact that I watch what I put on the internet. while “Larger and larger portions of the internet have become impossible to archive or scrape, and current, long-standing archives of old, internet content has started to rapidly degrade due to dead and dying links to other media.” this may be true about dying media, things from people resurface all the time even though one person might try to burry something they have posted, there have been multiple times where a famous actor or artist puts something onto the internet and it will come up 10 years later or whenever in a given time. According to the USA today there have been multiple celebrities that have been hurt by their past.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/12/07/kevin-hart-isnt-alone-stars-whose-past-tweets-caused-controversy/2236790002/