Worse than LaserDiscs?

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

Blogs and longevity | James’ Coffee Blog

When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.

Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.

This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.

🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

How Websites Die ⁑ Wesley’s Notebook

This is like the Gashlycrumb Tinies but for websites:

It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.