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It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums. "Internet never forgets"
by ajuc 3y ago
It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.
"Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy".
I prefer open web for sentimental reasons, but I don't think it's naturally better at preserving the information than walled gardens.
- account42 3y ago> It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums. Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire. > "Internet never forgets" This has alwasy been in the context of things you want the internet to forget and it still holds true. > "information wants to be free" And it does - once something leaks it is hard to put it back into the bag. > "censorship on the internet is impossible" I don't recall this claim but depending on how you look at things isn't really wrong: Is there any kind of information that you can't find on the internet because someone wants to hide it? Yes, some parts of the web are censored but remember the internet is not just the web and even on the web highly controversial websites can cling to life. > "easy access to information helps democracy" It does. Most people do not have easy access to information, at best they have a highly curated selection that the media wants them to see. They could avail themselves to the full picture but are conditioned not to.
- ajuc 3y agoMisinformation wants to be free just as much as information. Removing information is the wrong strategy, because internet makes publishing information so much easier. And bitrot+time will effectively remove the information for you if you just make people look elsewhere for long enough. So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.