When Online Content Disappears
www.pewresearch.org
external-link
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/25166889

This is even more concerning (or funny, depending on how dark your humour is) when you realise that it will be replaced by AI-generated webpages. Humanity’s presence on the internet is disappearing before our eyes.

Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

And also with less of the whole “they’re doing this to manipulate people into believing…things” and more “people want quick and superficial information so that’s all that’s being produced and since it’s easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that’s all the internet will be.” The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.

I think the Wikipedia article needs to be updated to be honest. Continuing to describe it as a “conspiracy theory” is quite misleading given the phenomenon is already underway and only picking up pace.

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