The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing
Katie Notopoulos, BuzzFeed.News, 2020/01/02
In 1998 I was posting on discussion boards (like the old HotWired Threads) and on mailing lists (like WWW-Dev) and seen some of these early forums come and go. So I decided that I should copy and preserve these posts on my own website, just in case the boards and lists disappeared. Which, in fact, they did. And that's how today I ended up with a huge archive of more than 1600 articles on my web site. But most people, as the author of this article suggests, "did nothing", and so we are now in the situation where a lot of the web's original content has been lost. Indeed, this article is a relatively recent listing of sites that wen't down - MySpace, Froendster, Xanga and Webshots. There's so much more - the venerated (and verifiably ugly) GeoCities, for example, Blip.tv and Google Videos (which between them lost about half my videos), and of course almost all of the aforementioned discussion board and mailing list contents. More...