Nothing is forever

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Nothing is forever, including links as seen by a Verge article delineating this interesting fact.

A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team. They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the NYT’s catalog going back to 1996, illustrating the problem of link rot and how difficult it is for context to survive on the web.

The study looked at over 550,000 articles, which contained over 2.2 million links to external websites. It found that 72 percent of those links were “deep,” or pointing to a specific page rather than a general website. Predictably, it found that, as time went on, links were more likely to be dead: 6 percent of links in 2018 articles were inaccessible, while a whopping 72 percent of links from 1998 were dead. For a recent, widespread example of link rot in practice, just look at what happened when Twitter banned Donald Trump: all of the articles that were embedded in his tweets were littered with gray boxes.

This digital decay also applies to "wonderful" BRT as some of links on this site most likely are toast as well as the only constant in reality is change.

A reverse view of link rot over time. Image: The Columbia Journalism Review

Time waits for no one, including the web.