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Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Thegn 2y agoWe just need to ask the NSA for their copy via a FOIA request.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoI wonder if they have all the music that was lost on Myspace
- sbarre 2y agoThey have an internal IceCast server with all of it.
- Nevolihs 2y agoThat's not quite true. There's overall a big, distributed and decentraliszed effort to archive our electronic past, it's not just archive.org. For example, it's fun to look at old newsgroup discussions from 1994, and it's something I can find at Google's archive. And more importantly, it's available to everybody. And it's not the only place to find historical internet stuff. I do agree though that archive.org is too valuable a resource to ever lose. Google also isn't perfect. There was a post the other week about how there were no searchable images on Google older than ... I don't remember, 2005?
- Foobar8568 2y agoThere has been plenty of content that has been wiped out for a lot of reasons : geocities went through a lot of changes pre-post yahoo buyout, all the university student pages, blogs/self host such has multimania/free/wanadoo (at least in France), forums such has ezboard. So much content disappeared and will disappear.
- nfriedly 2y agoI donate monthly to archive.org. I'm sure I've got more than my money's worth out of reserved websites that had something valuable to me.
- doubloon 2y agoit's a question of intent. 'the free world' loses internet content mostly because we are indifferent and don't value the humanities or social sciences as much as we used to. china loses internet content because it is a one party state dictatorship that is purposely trying to eradicate the cultural artefacts of it's victims and opponents, by hiring masses of people whose career goals are the purposeful destruction of memory. we do have examples similar to that, for example "free speech advocates" like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who abuse the legal system to silence critics. But those people are not literally running the government in a government that will never change hands.
- pessimizer 2y agoI think this is a delusion. The threat that archive.org is under is that the government will shut it down.
- Ajay-p 2y agoWritten by He Jiayan (何加盐), an internet influencer active since 2018, the essay concluded, based on a wide range of searches of various entertainment and cultural figures from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, that nearly 100 percent of content from major internet portals and private websites from the first decade of China’s internet has now been obliterated.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- typon 2y ago[flagged]
- z2 2y agoExactly, and without the likes of the Internet Archive, even the open web isn't safe. I think like most history preservation efforts today, you have to be really intentional about it given the sheer amount of information and noise. This isn't like centuries ago when everything public was a few periodicals and newspapers and books, accessible through very known channels.
- reaperducer 2y agoContent is now behind walled gardens and impossible to search for Yep. Most of the good vintage computing information is locked up in member-only Facebook groups now. More and more, when you ask a question on a web forum the response is "Oh, that's in the $x Facebook group." Great. How do I search for the topic? Oh, you can't.
- rasz 2y agoFB or Discord, both black holes.
- demosthanos 2y agoI'd hardly call it the same thing at all. In the Western internet a lot of early sites have come down gradually over time as their creators stopped paying for them, but many are also still up, including a lot of key relics. They're harder to find these days because Google prioritizes new content (shout-out to marginalia.nu), but they're there, and most (by historical traffic) of those that aren't there are preserved on IA. If there's collective memory loss it's organic and reparable. This article is about the Chinese government actively erasing memory in order to be able to better control the content that their people read, including a post bemoaning the loss of that content. What has happened to new content on the Western internet (getting isolated in walled gardens) is tragic, but it's not the same thing at all. > Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”
- lelandfe 2y ago> Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024). [..] Click on the result and you’ll find it is an article posted in 2021 US Google: About 2,580,000 results A pretty remarkable scrubbing of history.
- Arnavion 2y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=jack+ma&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1998%2Ccd_max%3A2005 https://www.google.com/search?q=jack+ma&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min... First result for me is https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-maker/jack-ma.html https://www.scb.co.th/en/personal-banking/stories/business-m... which Google thinks is from 2003-03-15, except it mentions COVID-19 so it obviously isn't. Second result is https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ https://www.instagram.com/jack_overpower/feed/ which Google thinks is from 2001-01-02, except Instagram didn't exist at that time. It might have pictures from 2001 though. Third result is http://pacificpower.foreignpolicy.com/15-jack-ma/ http://pacificpower.foreignpolicy.com/15-jack-ma/ which Google thinks is from 1999-02-15, except it mentions Alibaba's 2014 IPO so it obviously isn't. Fourth result is https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=504135796663455&id=311356742608029&_rdr https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=5041357966634... which Google doesn't show a date for, but it's a Facebook post from 2018. ... I don't doubt that some of those results are from 1998 to 2005, but the millions of results number specifically is meaningless.
- prophesi 2y agoYep; there may be a lack of incentive to preserve old sites, but what's worse are the ranking algorithms that prevent their discoverability in the first place.
- ccgreg 2y agoBoth the Internet Archive and Common Crawl have tools that reveal actual crawl dates. Search engines are not really intended to be archives, so it's no surprise that they aren't very good archives.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoPar for the course. China as we (the world) knows it is only about 60 years old. This is more true as they go about systematically destroying their own history and forcing village traditions to be stamped out and guided towards the city life. Losing a blip of internet history during the regime of mass censorship is probably a blessing in disguise.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wumeow 2y ago> Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”
- actionfromafar 2y agoHe will be educated.
- alephnerd 2y agoIs original MIT BBS still archived? I haven't used it for sometime.
- Cheer2171 2y agoThere are a few commenters in this thread making blatant false equivalence with the Western internet. This post is about how on major search engines in China, you now set the years to 1998-2005 and search for a non-controversial celebrity and you get zero search results from content actually published in that era. The loss of the early web due to web hosters not maintaining their own hosting and moving to walled gardens is painful and tragic, but it is not in any way similar (or functionally equivalent) to this blatant censorship.
- anonzzzies 2y agoYep... Only archive.org has it sometimes and then you need to search there because you won't find it via others.
- Cheer2171 2y agoBut for the Western internet, it disappears because the people hosting those websites gave up, so all we have is archive.org. With this case, there appears to be a government-level purge.
- ccgreg 2y agoThe western Internet has a bunch of government archives, in addition to the Internet Archive and Common Crawl. Many of the government archives are not public for copyright reasons.
- wumeow 2y agoYes, this is like if nothing turned up for Bill Gates when you did a search for pre-2006 material.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yterdy 2y ago[flagged]
- lostemptations5 2y agoIntentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content. Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Feynman Letters", etc. I'm paraphrasing-- but its impossible now. Think of this: emails? A person dies and their laptop dies or is disposed of -- they're all gone. In the past the physicality of the letters would persist. Not so now. All this correspondence vanishes. Facebook, are you kidding me? If someone famous thought to export their data -- and it can be found on a laptop still working (and you have the login password), then maybe. See above. This repeats and repeats for each system we interact with for communication. Aside from the laptop scenario-- all this is lost. We live now in a blackhole of historical details of information, and soon to be replaced by a fabricated history hallucinated by LLMs perhaps. Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.
- Cheer2171 2y agoAnother false equivalence. "Intentionally or not" actually really matters here. It took work to maintain archives in the pre-digital era, and it takes work to maintain archives in the digital era. So many of those physical letters were lost, rotted, burned, etc. This is a purge, not a failure to maintain archives. This is like when during the Cultural Revolution, they literally burned archives and letters by intellectuals.
- bloomingeek 2y agoI love your replay, your answer is the near perfect summing up of the issue! My view is some here in America are starting to get too lenient towards Russia and other authoritarian states. Do we not understand that these states want complete control and don't care how they get it? Information and educational purges are two of many ways this is done. After that, it gets dirty. Rule of thumb, if the Constitution says it stinks, it does. If we don't like something in it, work for a change. In China and Russia they don't have that right.
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- tehjoker 2y ago[flagged]
- Cheer2171 2y agoAnother false equivalence, not at all the same as in the West. This is government censorship scrubbing all search results from pre-2005. That Google update made it harder to search for groups that had put out misinformation and scammy SEO stuff, like googlebombing ("miserable failure" returns George W. Bush). Performing editorial or curatorial work is not in any way the same as a purge.
- tehjoker 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Cheer2171 2y agoYou think you are being a critical thinker, but you are just playing into anti-Western propaganda that makes it seem like there is no difference between the two. It should be pretty clear that China has the most sophisticated propaganda system in the world, and you have been ensnared by it.
- yterdy 2y agoContinuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)
- ck2 2y agoChina is too easy of an example of rewriting history by political will. In North Korea it is illegal to mention famine or hunger. In Florida it is illegal to mention climate change in any state document.
- tromp 2y ago> In Florida it is illegal to mention climate change in any state document. citation needed. Oh, found one: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article12983720.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article129837... ( https://archive.is/P9k4m https://archive.is/P9k4m ) > DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports I'm not sure that amounts to illegal, but they did at least make it career impairing. Would be interesting to see someone sue for wrongful termination on that basis...
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- gwern 2y agoWow - this explains a lot about why Chinese LLMs and AI struggle so much to get data, despite the supposed near-infinite databases: a lot of it is just gone, far more than anyone had ever proposed might be the case, because of neglect, censorship, walled gardens/apps killing everything trapped within, and chilling effects. You can't scrape what is no longer there, or was never written to begin with...
- rfoo 2y ago> supposed near-infinite databases: a lot of it is just gone Pretty sure megacorps still have their near-infinite databases around, in walled garden as always, but that's another topic. Censored contents are almost certainly soft-deleted. The problem is more about independent-ish sites, for example Tianya [1]. Think ancient BBS. Or newsgroups. If nearly all archive of these are lost it would indeed be very sad. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianya_Club#cite_note-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianya_Club#cite_note-4
- telotortium 2y ago> Pretty sure megacorps still have their near-infinite databases around Not necessarily. It's quite possible that, if no one accesses them, they got moved to backups with only one copy, and the backups may not actually be restorable in the case of disaster (it happens somewhat frequently even for backups of data you might actually care about, so imagine the effects of neglect on that).
- gwern 2y agoThere's also serious coordination problems internally. How easy is it to get access? Did you make buddies with the little emperors in charge of the historical archives? Is the archive in your company large enough? Are the chances of getting access to another competing company's dataset high enough to not require multiple decimal digits to express? (This I think is part of why Chinese human genomics has been such a disappointment: yes, there's collectively a lot of data, but there ain't nothing like UKBB pulling it all together. Just thousands of fiefdoms.)
- renonce 2y agoWhy expect search engines to return historical data accurately? Modern search engines have a lot of tasks like combating CEO and returning up-to-date data, and they have no incentive to preserve history as old as 2005 as it’s very likely that any page from that date has been superseded by more relevant articles. The task of preserving history should be delegated to archive.org and search engines are just not well positioned.
- falleng0d 2y agoDid you read the post?
- renonce 2y agoI did read the original post in Chinese, though not this post in English. Unfortunately beyond the claim "search engines show up zero results" the other claims like 99.99% pages disappearing doesn't fully match my experience. I have lots of threads between 2000~2010 on Baidu Tieba (Chinese Reddit), and most of these threads representative of my memories from that decade are alive (I can even access them anonymously). The earliest video on bilibili.com still available is av7 (7th video since its creation). While some websites like RenRen did disappear together with its history, most websites that remain relevant didn't delete its history in its entirety (lots of content did disappear because of modern moderation applied retroactively to old content, but that's case by case).
- jinji 2y agoOhhhh
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- furrypony 2y agoAlso, the Chinese Internet is "self-segregating". You know how it is with the Great Fire Wall: you can't visit some outside websites from inside. Wikipedia was blocked completely in 2019. There's actually another direction: you can't visit some inside websites from outside: Most Chinese apps/websites are required by law to be tied to person identities. That means they have to be registered by phone number. In China, one person = one phone number. Without Chinese phone numbers, most Chinese apps/websites simply refuse to even let you use it. There is no way to get a phone number without physically going to a Chinese phone-card bureau and present your ID card. Indeed, it is getting difficult for foreigners nowadays to visit China. Without a phone number they can't do anything with Chinese apps, but they need that. Getting a phone number requires presenting a passport and a valid visa. Foreign map apps are usually broken in China. Foreigners who are not physically located within China are just trouble, from the Chinese point of view. Not only do they not want Chinese people to use foreign apps, they also don't want foreign people to use Chinese apps. A few months ago I tried registering a QQ account. The "International" version is no longer maintained. When I tried nevertheless the last known good version, it just threw an error. The "domestic" version does not work when the phone is not physically located within China, and requires a Chinese phone number anyway. About 2 weeks ago I noticed that Zhihu also stopped allowing you to expand long answers without an account. And of course, to register an account, you need a damned phone number. At least it allows American phone numbers. Philosophically, I think it is the resurgence of the Chinese security mindset: Forbid all inside-outside contact by default. We have everything we need at home anyway. Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures. --- Emperor Qian Long's Letter to King George III, 1793
- fagrobot 2y ago[dead]