The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish. But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. 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. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, joins Decoder this week to explain both why and how the organization tries to keep the web from disappearing. Links: When Online Content Disappears | Pew Research Game Informer is shutting down | The Verge When Media Outlets Shutter, Why Are the Websites Wiped, Too? Slate MTV News lives on in the Internet Archive | The Verge The video game industry is mourning the loss of Game Informer | The Verge Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future | Decoder How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral | Decoder The Internet Archive is defending its digital library in court today | The Verge The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend ebooks | The Verge The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending | The Verge Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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