Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?

1. Write notes in your own words

It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.

Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.

2. Refer to the Internet Archive

Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is

Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.

Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.

3. Create your own personal archive

A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.

Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.

Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.

With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.

4. Don’t worry, be happy

Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.

More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?

Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?

5. Sow and then reap

The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.

Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.

None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.

I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.

Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too