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



AtFruitBat
@AtFruitBat

It truly is terrible.

Tried taking up archery last night, and had to stop with an incipient migraine, because archery requires me to stare into the screen and gauge distance and depth, and uh... It's hard to do that when the game is full of flashing, flickering, flat white rectangles and random blinding balls of light. 😂

After I visit the elf village I will revert to a thief ASAP, as that hurts my eyes less.


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