Pernicious Link Rot
Felix Salmon, the finance blogger at Reuters, has written a thoughtful piece in the wake of Google’s impending mass deletion of adult Blogger blogs:
But with today’s news that Google seems to be about to vaporize a significant number of the blogs on its Blogger platform, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the problem of link rot isn’t going away – if anything, it’s getting worse.
I’m a great believer that once something is placed on the internet for free, it should continue to stay there, for free, unless there’s an extremely good reason to delete it. Back when hosting websites was difficult and expensive, that was easier said than done. But now web hosting is effectively free, there’s really no excuse – and one might hope that, as a result, we’d see less link rot.
But that’s not what’s happening.
…
These mass deletions are huge; they make me feel almost sheepish about the anger with which I greeted, say, Greg Mankiw’s decision, back in 2007, not only to close his blog to comments, but at the same time to delete all the previous comments which had been made, with no warning. All the conversations which had taken place in his comments section, all the smart rebuttals which had been made – all of them just disappeared, overnight. Today, I’d barely blink at such a thing…
I share Mr. Salmon’s sheepishness. I haven’t forgotten the passion I brought to my 2006 rant about people who contribute to link rot by deleting blogs for no good reason; I’ve hated it since Susannah Breslin deleted her “The Reverse Cowgirl’s Blog” sometime between August 2 and October 5 of 2003. But in 2006, I never foresaw mass deletions of social media by corporate policy. I’d have scoffed if you had told me that in 2013 this would be a normal business practice for profitable corporations, rather than outrageous behavior condemned by all.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=10152
I don’t comment much.. I suppose never. Just wanted to drop a note to say I enjoy the blog. I most enjoy the respectful – but not sanctimonious – presentation of, well, titilation. A close second would be reading your take on the ins-and-outs-and-life-as a blog manager.
That’s all.
It’s good reading.
Thank you, Sean! That’s always good to hear, and nice of you to say so.
Bacchus, I think we’re part of an older generation of Internet users. I care about “links” and agonize about “link rot”, I bookmark pages for later reading and keep those bookmarks archived indefinitely, I use my collected bookmarks as my preferred way to “surf” the Internet, follow links to discover new websites… Heck, *I manually type in URLs* for websites I remember the URL to, or when I read it in print or something.
Nowadays, the Google-run & Facebook-run Internet doesn’t want anything of that. They want people to “effortlessly” navigate the web via keywords, while *THEY* control which destination those keywords actually point to. I could write down a URL, by heart, in ink on paper, and hand it to my young brother or aging mother (who are effectively the same “generation” of Internet users), and what are they going to do with it? Type it into a Google search box. “Kids these days”, etc.
Nowadays, In corporate-run Internet, information ages fast, by design: “news” from last week are deemed worthless, passé! Who cares, then, that such “obsolete” information is made impossible to retrieve? “Content management” back-office software for “Search-Engine-Optimized” sites is, more often than not, set not to generate a timestamp or, worse even, to generate a fake one: whenever you search for it, the page will register as freshly generated today. Thus, information is removed from context.
Misbehaving corporations profit from erasing tracks and messing with people’s perception of time. History (in the sense of a faithful record of previous deeds and facts) and the establishment are natural enemies, and the latter always profits from erasing and/or rewriting the former.
All that you say is true, Rafu. But despite all that, a lot of the “deep internet” remains if you know how to navigate and search it. Much that was here is gone, but a lot more is still out there if you look hard enough. And I’m radical about the value of information. There’s no site so worthless that it doesn’t offer some sort of sociological or historical insight for the future. I may be an old man shouting at clouds, but when stuff vanishes forever, I do care.
Amen to that. I’m also an old man shouting at clouds, apparently.