However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance
From the article, CNET is archiving it on Wayback themselves.
It’s fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they’re archiving the articles before taking them down.
To address the headline, though, I don’t think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we’ve been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.
It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it’d been shared a few times.
Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I’m much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.
However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance.
People are freaking out so bad about this story. They’re doing the right thing and archiving it before deletion. Settle down.
How many CNET articles from 2004 are you reading that you’re getting this angry about it?
Storage and bandwidth have never been cheaper. If you’re not doing some grand replacement of the CMS, it’s less effort NOT to remove old content.
I love the argument they’re trying to make: if they prune enough content, everything looks fresh and new. So you’re effectively discarding one of the most valuable assets you have-- the fact you’ve been doing the same thing for 25 years and have some established credibility-- for a perception of “fast” that could be imitated by any number of content mills or AI services.
If you’re looking at a review of a RTX 4090, it says a lot when the same site also scored the Radeon VII, Geforce 3 Ti, and S3 Savage.
Because then they are hosting content that actively won’t show up in any search?
Hosting web content (especially with lots of images) costs money. Historically, sites like cnet were built around ad revenue. It is worth keeping a review of a 2001 GE Refrigerator online if it comes up when people search for the model number (generally to figure out specs to shop for a replacement). It is not worth it if that is showing up when people want to buy a 2023 GE Refrigerator or actively penalizes you for having too much “old” content and so forth.
And if it won’t generate any ad revenue going forward? baleeted!
It looks like they misunderstand how to improve their SEO ranking
In fact, on Tuesday, Google’s SearchLiaison X account tweeted, “Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like “old” content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this. Older content can still be helpful, too. Learn more about creating helpful content.”
TBH this doesn’t make me certain this tactic won’t work, Google hardly seems to know how their SEO works. They sorta intentionally do this so they can blame anything suspicious on their black box, “AI”.
does this actually help the internet archive in any way? as in are your local ressources used or ad revenue generated? i fail to see how telling them to archive everything you visit is of any help to them. other than you being basically a crawler, i guess
I think your missing the point. As you browse throughout your lifetime you will eventually come across a site that went down that you used to frequent. If you are contributing in this manner the content you viewed is guaranteed to be archived and you will know where to start looking since you already had this set up. It just also adds the extra benefit for everyone else who wants to look.
i still think this kind of shotgun approach is not ideal, and the extension seems more like a service to me than a way to help the ia. so “help contribute” is not the wording i would chose. but i very well might be missing the point. i do love the internet archive and their fight for information freedom, don’t get me wrong. this was more of a nitpick.
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