plastermaster
@plastermaster

I feel like whenever I find myself on a nascent social media platform where people share cool websites they find from across the internet, I tend to just bookmark the post for later and then find myself surprised if some of the websites are gone by the time I need them.
There's one great way to both prevent this from happening and do a public good at the same time: Making sure a working copy of the page is on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. There's an "add page now" function that's right on the Wayback Machine's homepage.
We don't know what will come in the future. Some weird company decision can always wreck dozens of websites or make the website owners unwilling to maintain it. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Making sure a working copy of the page is on the Internet Archive is an important precaution to prevent the cool sites you find from being lost forever in as little as five years' time.


plastermaster
@plastermaster

Here's a study from 2013 that found half of all web citations used in academic papers were defunct in 2.5 years

Here's another 2013 study that found that the median lifespan of a webpage is 9.3 years, with 62% being archived

Here's a 2021 study that found over half the articles on The New York Times between 1996 and mid-2019 that contained at least one URL also contained a dead link

It seems like a fair portion of websites that aren't on a social media or something die within a few years. Social media sites seem to also be temperamental when subjected to moderation or a number of any other factors (e.g. cyberbullying, abuse, or user preference)
I cannot emphasize enough that if you find a useful blog or reddit post to consider archiving it. Reddit archives their own posts but I do not trust them
Also shoutouts to Pseudiom's video on Google Search Decay for referencing these studies and making me aware of them


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in reply to @plastermaster's post:

yw. Trying to spread this message if only to save a few extra websites that people care about.
Honestly what inspired this post was that Brawl In The Family's archive page (the one that listed all the comics in order) was briefly down and the idea that the whole webcomic could be inaccessible one day when Mr. Taranto decides to stop paying Keenspot or Keenspot were to go down I was like WHAT THE FUCK NOT THIS so yeah