Vanishing history in the internet era

For generations, historians, genealogists and other researchers have used newspapers and other paper records for their studies. Paper and physical photographic copies make good archival materials.
The same can’t be said of digital materials. Much of the early history of the consumer internet has been erased. Website operators didn’t give much thought to preserving internet content in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Even now, content regularly disappears from the internet, never to be seen again.
I personally have lost several websites for my varied interests after hosting services failed. Also, hundreds of my articles disappeared forever when one publisher changed its content management system. Many weblinks to news articles that I’ve bookmarked for personal projects no longer work.
Such is life in the age of ephemeral online content.
What follows are some examples of disappearing online content from the past year or so.

• In July 2018, a three-part article on Medium recounted how snarky celebrity gossip website The Superficial was shut down and “wiped clean from the internet.”
• In March this year, early social network Myspace admitted that it had lost all the music uploaded by users to its site from its founding in 2003 until 2015. Many musicians used to rely on Myspace to spread their music, and over the years it hosted 53 million songs from 14.2 million artists, Ars Technica and the Daily Mail reported. Myspace said it also lost untold user photos, videos and audio files from the same period.
• Also in March, Facebook acknowledged that it deleted old posts by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “obscuring details about core moments in Facebook’s history,” Business Insider reported. There also have been issues accessing Facebook’s archive of older corporate blog posts, it said.
• Similarly, in April, Google erased some of its history when it deleted executive accounts on its Google+ social networking site. The purge included accounts belonging to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, current CEO Sundar Pichai, and former CEO Eric Schmidt, Business Insider said.
• In May, one of the earliest and most influential meme culture websites, You’re The Man Now Dog, went dark, the Verge reported. The site, known as YTMND, “suffered a catastrophic failure” and may never return.

Related articles:

A Public Record at Risk: The Dire State of News Archiving in the Digital Age (Columbia Journalism Review; March 28, 2019)

Why there’s so little left of the early internet (BBC; April 2, 2019)

Photo: “S” by Monceau via Creative Commons.