Tweets that disappear
And it's not just about links. When looking at that other cultural reference point, “tweets” on platform X (formerly Twitter), a similar pattern became evident. From a representative sample of 5 million tweets posted between March 8 and April 27, 2023, the team found that by June 15, 18% had disappeared. And that number could rise a lot if the company ever stops redirecting URLs from its historic twitter.com domain name.
Some languages were more affected than others by the disappearance of tweets: the rate of tweets in English was 20% and that of tweets in Arabic and Turkish a remarkable 42% and 49%, respectively.
Pew is not the first to investigate the issue. In 2021, an analysis by Harvard Law School of 2,283,445 links within articles on New York Times The articles found that of the 72% that were deep links (i.e., pointing to a specific article rather than a home page), 25% were inaccessible.
As a website that has been around since 1996, The New York Times is a good measure of long-term link decay. Not surprisingly, the further back in time you went, the more evident the corruption became: 72% of links dating back to 1998 and 42% from 2008 were no longer accessible.
This study also looked at content drift, that is, the degree to which a page is accessible but has changed over time, sometimes dramatically, from its original form. In that sense, 13% of a sample of 4,500 pages published in the New York Times had changed significantly since they were first published.
Where is IT going wrong?
Does any of this matter? One could argue that the disappearance or change of web pages is inevitable even if many people don't notice or don't care.
