30
votes
Goldfish memories - most of China’s early websites have disappeared
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Goldfish Memories - China Media Project
- Authors
- David Bandurski
- Published
- May 27 2024
- Word count
- 1265 words
From the article:
…
There is a partial translation of the essay at the end of the article.
This would happen to the western democracies as well, if we allow our governments to have more control over the content.
For example In Canada news is blocked from all social media platforms.
I think that’s unfortunate, but I don’t see most social media platforms serving as archives. It seems like they mostly don’t have good ways of searching for old posts? Reddit can be searched using Google, so that’s a bit better.
I’m curious how that works for Reddit. What do they block for Canadians?
Reddit doesn't meet the criteria for inclusion, so they don't do anything. Really, only Facebook and Google are affected by this law -- the criteria were created basically to target them specifically. And Google isn't blocking, they're choosing to pay. The only one blocking is Facebook.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2023/12/backgrounder-final-regulations-for-the-online-news-act.html
A digital platform must meet all the following thresholds in order to be subject to the framework:
The last one is I believe where reddit gets to escape.
Agreed, if anything, Facebook and its ilk have hastened the impermanence of content on the web. So much is ephemeral now. Even if it gets archived somewhere it’s likely hard to index and search for later.
Yeah, it’s next to impossible to find posts that I’ve seen on Instagram once I’ve left the app. Even just a few seconds later they seem to have vanished. I suppose from Meta’s point of view it keeps me “engaged” longer trying to hunt for a post, but the longer-term result is that I haven’t actually opened the app in months.
A side effect, it seems, is that it allows some privacy through obfuscation. Maybe I'm over selling it here, but it seems to me that if stuff is rapidly disappearing and not searchable, it makes it much harder for individuals to glean information on other people.
I don't have any data or anything to back up this opinion, just feels like it might be the case.
Actually only blocked from Meta.