I'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

I'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.”