Digital archives disappear faster than people expected

Digital information is not self-preserving, and the first decades of the web are already suffering link rot and archive loss

The history of the internet is only about 30 years long. What I've come to realize after operating for this amount of time is that old information steadily disappears. Everyone assumed that because it's digital, it would be archived forever
Ranked #25 on backlist 2026-06-07 (07 Jun 2026 UTC) · by (orangeitems) ·

How it ranks: Backlist reads my Twitter/X timeline, scores every tweet for substance with an LLM rubric (not engagement), and publishes the daily top picks with a one-line takeaway. Curated by Surya Dantuluri.