2 ms·
It may not be your 'responsibility', whatever that means, and it would be nice if there was less link rot, but the fact remains: you provided those links becaus
by gwern 7y ago
It may not be your 'responsibility', whatever that means, and it would be nice if there was less link rot, but the fact remains: you provided those links because you thought they were relevant & useful for the reader; many of them are going to break; are you going to fix them, or not?
You have decided you do not care enough about your writings or your readers to invest the effort to fix them. That is your decision, and I don't know enough about you, your writings, or your readers to criticize it.
I have decided differently.
- WorldMaker 7y agoI was not criticizing your decision, simply trying to offer a differing viewpoint. I briefly considered doing something similar to the path you are traveling down, but realized that I was happier taking a different path. I provided those links because I thought they were relevant and useful to the reader at the time. I can't fight time and I can't fight entropy for all of the web or even just my own tiny corner. I salute you for trying. I set my border at the end of domain names that I control, because I know I have responsibilities there and I'm able to also in good conscious end them there, otherwise I'd feel so much guilt for how the web has shifted and changed in > 20 years of posting webpages to it. My blog captures moments in time, and just as I don't go back and fix rotten opinions that haven't aged well in some of them, I generally don't go back and fix broken links. I would hope that anyone exploring my past archives would give past me the benefit of the doubt and contemplate such archives from the context in which they were written and the very different person that wrote them and sometimes the very different web that they were posted to.