Link Rot and Digital Decay on Government, News and Other Webpages | Pew Res

i appreciate articles that report on research and findings, spend time on making the details of the study itself transparent.

this one is super detailed! (though, most articles just need to link to the study and give it a paragraph, sometimes just knowing the sample size and method might be enough)

i do have some follow up thoughts

1. it would be worth coming up with a framework and what the cost of link rot is?
2. not all link rot costs the same (ex: a link to an AI summary ...)
3. when measuring link rot, of the rot that is found, was it preserved on the internet archive?
4. LLM companies likely have a lot to gain by investing in the internet archive's efforts

Pew Research Center analysis shows that a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023. 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists. Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted.