The digital realm is often perceived as more permanent than the physical. Libraries and museums work hard to digitize their collections, despite the fact that we have already lost access to multiple forms of early digital documentation.

“Link rot” as Gomes refers to it, pervades every corner of the internet, including the scholarly and academic. Because the web hosts many kinds of information, citation across these various mediums is complicated by how well they hold up over time. He says in The Past Web“The Web has come to be used to publish important scientific information that complements published literature (e.g. datasets, documentation or software), but a few years after publication, the cited online information commonly disappears, causing a permanent loss of unique and valuable scientific information.”

The expanding web of the early 1990s was home to a myriad of unique and user-driven platforms. On GeoCities users published pages pertaining to one of many neighborhoods: “Athens” for writing and education, “Hollywood” for celebrity or entertainment. That is, until Yahoo bought it in 1999, introduced paywalls and advertisement, and then subsequently shut it down, deleting all 38 million pages, in 2009. Similarly, Orkut was a social network that was bought by Google and then shut down. Posterous, which launched in 2008, was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and shut down in 2013. In 2008 AbsolutePunk, an online music zine, had 500,000 members, and in 2016 BuzzMedia shut it down too.

Across the board, these closures result in loss of media. Lialina and a team of archivists created One Terabyte of The Digital Age, which recorded a terabyte of user pages to be archived online when she found out GeoCities was coming to an end. In 2019 SmugMug, which bought the photo-hosting platform Flickr, introduced free accounts that would have an 1000 image limit, and any surplus pictures had to be downloaded before February 2019 at risk of irreversible deletion.