Sunday, July 12, 2020

Disappearing online content is like a David Copperfield act

Nothing is permanent on the internet.
Articles and whole websites vanish like magic. Poof! They’re gone. Reasons include companies changing their focus or content management systems or simply going out of business. We lose a bit of our culture every time that happens.
For whatever reason, you’re never sure something is going to be online the next time you check.
You can see the trend by looking at the interesting websites I occasionally document on Tech-media-tainment.
From August 2009 to November 2017, I spotlighted 300 interesting websites on Tech-media-tainment. Of those, 80 are no longer online. That’s 27% of the websites I spotlighted during that period that are no longer available.
Of the first 100 websites I wrote about, from August 2009 to July 2015, 29% are no longer available.
On Friday, personal website hosting service Soup.io announced that it will shut down on July 20.
Many former Tumblr users turned to Soup.io when Tumblr started terminating its users websites for supposed copyright violations and adult content.
When Soup.io turns the lights off, it will shut down thousands of users’ multimedia and meme blogs.
Just another day on the internet.


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