I recently read How to disappear completely by s.e. smith at theverge.com and it sent me down a little rabbit hole. The article poses the question "What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?" It's something I've thought about quite a bit recently as I've been working to restore old my content to this site.

It's easy to see the cause of the disappearance. In the article the author lays out a number of examples of vanishing web content. Almost invariably the examples cited are of companies shutting down their sites and services generally for financial reasons. The corporate enclosure of the web has been ongoing for almost as long as the Internet has been around, and as long as we have to hitch our wagons to corporate services whose obligation is to shareholders, the loss of content as these sites are shuttered due to "disappointing fourth quarter performance" should be the expected outcome.

But I think there's a second component to the loss of content - the rise of "platforms" It's no coincidence that this site wound down in 2006, the same year Facebook opened to public access. I and most of my friends with an online presence migrated there pretty quickly, and shortly after I let my domain registration expire. I doubt my experience is unique. I suspect a large number of sites went dark as the lure of social media sites drew people in.

Some additional reading:

The Vanishing Web: What Happened to a Quarter of Our Digital History?

Why leaning on the Wayback Machine isn't sufficient. We're losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?

Another site going dark? StackOverflow Usage Plummets as AI Chatbots Rise