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Decoder with Nilay Patel

How the Wayback Machine is fighting linkrot

05 Sep 2024

Transcription

Full Episode

0.723 - 15.609 Citi

Amgen, a leading biotechnology company, needed a global financial company to facilitate funding and acquisition to broaden Amgen's therapeutic reach, expand its pipeline, and accelerate bringing new and innovative medicines to patients in need globally.

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16.25 - 29.075 Citi

They found that partner in Citi, whose seamlessly connected banking, markets, and services businesses can advise, finance, and close deals around the world. Learn more at citi.com slash client stories.

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31.206 - 52.314 Mila Atmos

Do you want to be a more empowered citizen but don't know where to start? It's time to sharpen your civic vision and ignite the spark for a brighter future. I'm Mila Atmos, and on my weekly podcast, Future Hindsight, I bring you conversations to translate today's most urgent issues into clear, actionable ways to make impact.

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52.934 - 59.277 Mila Atmos

With so much at stake in our democracy, join us at futurehindsight.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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63.103 - 82.66 Nilay Patel

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We've been talking a lot about the future of the web on Decoder and across The Verge lately. And one big problem keeps coming up. Huge chunks of it keep going offline. In a lot of meaningful ways, large portions of the web are just dying.

83.34 - 103.248 Nilay Patel

Servers go offline, software upgrades break links and pages, companies go out of business. The web isn't static, and that means sometimes parts of it simply vanish. And it's not just the really old internet from the 90s or early 2000s that's at risk. A recent study from Pew found that 38% of all links from 2013 are no longer accessible.

103.968 - 125.344 Nilay Patel

That's more than a third of the collected media, knowledge, and online culture from just a decade ago gone. Pew calls it digital decay, but for decades, many of us have simply called this phenomenon link rot. And lately, link rot has meant a bunch of really meaningful journalism has gone away as well, as various news outlets have failed to make it through the platform era.

126.045 - 144.035 Nilay Patel

The list is virtually endless. Sites like MTV News, Gawker, Twice, Protocol, The Messenger, and most recently Game Informer are all just gone. Some of these were short-lived, but some were outlets that were live for literal decades, and their entire archives vanished overnight. But it's not all grim.

144.455 - 164.779 Nilay Patel

For nearly as long as we've had a consumer internet, we've had the Internet Archive, a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. It was founded in 1996, and in 2001 it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time.

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