With things shifting around the internet the past year, and also just…Having been on the internet for awhile now, I feel like this saying, while decent as a cautionary measure…May not really hold up past that. Am I being a little naive though?
Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?
I feel like even in the corporate web, a bunch of that old data’s probably been long lost courtesy of costcutting measures and businesses going under.
It is surely less accurate than it was presented to be a decade ago. I have searched for info I knew it was online 10 years ago, and most of it is either lost entirely, or Google is useless nowadays and can’t find it anymore
I don’t think it was ever intended in the sense that content, once online, will always be available online.
Just that, once posted, it’s now in storage that you have no control over. Even if the original is removed, it can still be in any number of different places; anything from intentional private collections, to random webserver caches. It can re-apear in the public eye at anytime, you just need to combine someone that’s got a copy with a reason to post it again.
Posting content online is relinquishing control of its existence.
Unless you have the control on the webpage hosting a content, it’s pretty hard to remove something out of the internet. Even if you do, people may-have back-up or screenshots, then there is place like internet archives where you’d find tons of old websites.
That said, tons of stuff end-up disappearing over-time. Look how many forum have closed down, is myspace still alive ? Recently, the French "Skyrock blog"platform closed down, but all of it’s archive have been given to the French national library so in a few decades, sociologist will have tons of data about the youth of the millenials
Some good practice of digital hygiene include :
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Do not use your real name, and change pseudonyms
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Beware of photos, at a point mass face recognition will be the norm, so assume you’re not anonymous, Posting a photo after proudly finishing a Marathon or earning a Karate black belt is fine. But if a photo isn’t fine out of context, don’t publish it.
I went looking for old forums I used to frequent, and while the site itself is on the internet archive most of the conversations are lost. Only one or two snapshots a year
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Once it’s been posted online, you have no control or indication that someone else has saved that to their own storage.
You can remove your post, but you have absolutely no way to ensure its truly gone, even if you can’t find another copy anywhere.
Web sites and pages come and go, but the search engine indices are forever. The Internet Archive, for example, uses data from a search engine crawler to populate their archive of the internet (until Alexa was shut down by Amazon, they do their own crawling now). Google likely has a lot of old internet data in archives as well.
I think it’s less that it DOES exist forever and more that it CAN exist forever
It depends, I think. If it’s a scurrilous, untrue rumour about your sexual habits, then it will be preserved indefinitely. If it’s some critical information, that is only published in one place, and you need to cite it for a paper, then it’s either gone or modified beyond recognition.
Yup. Expect that everything lasts exactly as long as you don’t want it to.
Sometimes entire journals disappear (or maybe they never existed to begin with)
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2023/12/where-do-journals-go-to-die.html
And if it’s a forum discussion with a solution to your current technical problem, the link will be dead.
If it’s some critical information, that is only published in one place, and you need to cite it for a paper, then it’s either gone or modified beyond recognition.
So the critical information may be best preserved if in some way associated with unscrupulous, dubious information? Or in other words, the tried and true folktale/embellishment transmission method?
Yeah, just post something critical online and in the author section write something like “the author likes to masturbate in front of a window during the day while hula dancing” and the critical info will survive the heat death of the universe.
It’s not written in either. It’s digital code stored on various electronic media.
It’s a metaphor mate
Mating with a metaphor?!?! Is that like a linguistic breeding thing?
Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?
The No Such Agency probably has a copy in its data centre in Utah. Other nation state actors probably have one as well if it’s the singular and not the plural (decade).
The problem is you don’t know what is in ink and what is in pencil till years after the fact.
A forum I visited way back when, Kuro5hin, no longer exists but there is some snapshots on archive.org but I doubt that anything I wrote there is accessible (or traceable back to me either here of in real life.)
A blog I wrote for a couple of years back around '07 is definitely still online. But again, there is no way to connect it to current me.
TLDR: Be really sure before you put your real life name or identifying info to anything online.
Anything that you want disappear will exist forever. Anything you want preserved will disappear tomorrow.
Too true. This principal needs a name
I would say it’s written in disappearing ink. It can’t be erased easily but can fade with time (assuming nobody comes along and adds more ink to repair the fading)
Just always bear in mind that Beyonce had this photo deleted from the internet:
Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?
Search for your old user name(s) and see for yourself. It’s funny how much old stuff I find with the names I used back then. Some of it long forgotten, most of it pretty cringeworthy.
I go with “Always assume that nothing is anonymous and everything is permanent”.
I’d add “and backup anything you care about”.
Because websites, webservices, content can all disappear, move, get deleted etc.
