Ask Slashdot: How Long Will the Internet Remember Us?

An anonymous reader writes "The common trope these days is that the internet never forgets. We tech-inclined folk warn our friends and relatives that anything embarrassing they put on the internet will stay there whether they want it to or not. But at the same time, we're told about massive amounts of data being lost as storage services go out of business or as the media it's stored on degrades and fails. There are organizations like the Internet Archive putting a huge amount of effort into saving everything that can be saved, and they're not getting all of it. My question is this: how long can we reasonably expect the internet to remember us? Assume, of course, that we're not doing anything particularly famous or notable — just normal people leading normal lives. Will our great-grandkids be able to trace our online presence? Will all your publicly-posted photos be viewable in 50 years, or just the one of you tripping over a sheep and falling into the mud?"

Comments

Depends

[cold fjord]

The internet has selective retention, and things do disappear. It is still possible, last time I checked, to pull up some usenet posts that I made in the mid 90s. At one time Google was able to pull up certain information about me, but that disappeared 10 years ago. On the other hand, lots of things people posted online in information services like GEnie, CompuServe, The Source, etc., never made it onto the internet. Also, many of the old internet archives, ftp sites, gopher sites, archie sites, etc., are rapidly disappearing. I used to spend a certain amount of time spelunking, looking for various types of old information, and a lot of it has disappeared. Some professor leaves and his site and papers eventually tend to go away either by plan, accident, or negligence. A university reorganizes its web site, and old files and personal information goes away. Even on Slashdot it can be hard to find posts I made years ago. For years prior to getting an account I used to post from time to time, and I can find a couple of the posts I remember, but there is one I'd really like to find, and just can't. It seems to have faded into the ether.

You see the same thing happen with blogs and personal web sites. They tends to hand around for a time, sometimes a very long time. But if you change to another service, or lose interest, your stuff eventually tends to disappear for all sorts of reasons. In some cases that can mean a real loss of useful information given the growing important of blogs.

I think the fading memory of the internet is actually a problem. It often seems that for every bit of information that makes it onto the internet there is some fraction of other information that fades away. That would be great if the only problems we faced were new ones, but we keep having to fight the same old battles again and again. Sometimes the old documentation that had faded into irrelevance becomes very timely again, and the old techniques beat the new ones under the changed conditions. That is assuming you can find the documentation to make them work.