There are reasons why much of the internet today looks the same, and there are reasons why certain practices fell out of use. Here is an example: the html tag "marquee" makes text bounce back and forth in a box. It is wildly impractical. But the tag itself is now incompatible with many coding languages. Some browsers, a few of which were invented well after the tag’s heyday, no longer exhibit text that was tagged with the "marquee" feature.
In short, the architecture of the internet is increasingly unforgiving to the old web, and search engines and browsers have no interest in preserving what does not comply.
The disappearance of internet content is entirely unsurprising. Services online are constantly under threat of a more profitable alternative. Generally, 38% of webpages that were online in 2013 are no longer accessible. According to Pew Research, "23% of news web pages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites." Gomes cites a study by the Digital Library of the ACM which found that 4 years after a study is published, 50% of its online citations are unavailable.
There is a correlation between the fall of the vernacular web and the failings of the corporate web.
“The many-to-many principle really worked. Making your own site and building collections was a parallel process for a lot of people. The early web was more about spirit than skills. To distribute was no less important than to create.”
Without a sense of responsibility for online space, there is little reason to expect very much in return. The decentralised web depended on people to maintain and create online. Without that relationship, and with corporate middlemen like search engines, standardized templates, and social media, the internet has become more privatized and less personal.
What does it mean to distribute? What does it mean to preserve?
