What I'm still looking for are all the stuff I’ve lost and can't find on the Internet. No I’m not talking about a meme I posted on my old Facebook account or a tweet I made when I used to be on Twitter. I'm talking about that one family photo I had saved on a Facebook account I deleted because of frustration from fraudsters trying to same me. I don't have the password, or even the Gmail I used to create it. And I didn't use a title or tag for the picture, I just posted it so I can't Search for it, it's gone forever.
I read about Google taking off its shortened URLs and that means billions of links, just gone. This is basically digital extinction happening.
The concern here is that they make it look like it's a normal thing. You can wake up one day, log into an old account on a service that barely exists anymore and you find half the links are dead. So all that experience you had in life, photos you took and saved there just vanishes.
The internet is now where most of our history lives so when those links die, our story is being ripped out. Your future lineage may have no data of you or your life just like how you don't know how your ancestors really look like.
The Wayback Machine is doing its best to save online data but they can’t save everything. Whole archives can disappear before anyone even realizes what’s lost. Even platforms like Tumblr, Yahoo which I thought will keep data are also losing them.
The problem here is with the social media and online service provider tech companies. They don’t care about preserving anything unless it profits them. Right now, there are entire TV shows and films getting erased because times have changed and people are not interested to watch anymore. The Internet is too fragile.
So all the space we're clearing on the internet is going to be for AI training data or whatever the next big tech obsession will be. I hope the Internet doesn't get boring and robotic in the future. When the next generation wants to look back at history there will be nothing left to see.