Link Rot is a serious problem for the internet in general. From Gwern: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.

>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

>My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.

See also physical books, letters, LPs, etc.'

Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.

But people have been preserving physical books for hundreds, even thousands of years. Physical archives have been a thing for a long time and try to preserve everything from music to letters to government records. Historians often use letters and notes written by people hundreds of years ago, because people often saved that stuff.

Same with web content most of this content is likely still somewhere. While you and I have no access too it someone does, whether they'll share it with us is another thing all together.

That's not necessarily true. Some of it is preserved by the internet archive, but a lot falls through the cracks.

Maybe you mean it's still on someone's home computer. But hard drives fail over time. So do CDs, floppy disks, and flash drives. Over time all this stuff will be lost unless someone makes an effort to preserve it.

I'm referring mainly to the authors of these works likely having something lying on a hard drive sitting on a shelf or backed up on 'C: Back up 2012-06-21 4 of 7'. These are much like those piles of old letters found in Grandma's attic, mostly unintelligible (I certainly can't read the cursive scrawls) but still ultimately not 'lost' if someone is prepared to spend the time recovering them.

Oh Come on. You have never heard of the Library of Alexandria? The day this was gone, we lost one of the largest chunk of older books and parchments. We are talking about a huge collection that went up in flames.

The documents we still have now are just a tiny fraction of what existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...

That was over a thousand years ago. And it even proves my point that people in the past did try to preserve things.

Indeed. I, for one, am very grateful that most of my high school papers have since faded into the abyss ;-)

... or so I hope.

hs.archive.org/beta/

IPFS proposes a distributed solution to link-rot and long-term storage solution

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...

This makes me think of the thousands of domain names that expire every day.

Most probably housed spam, but some probably housed at least some work of value.