The Honest Courtesan

A number of readers have asked me why most of the links on my blog now lead to archived copies of web pages rather than the originals.  One reason is that many news sites are now paywalled, and archive sites circumvent 90% of paywalls; another is that so many sites now demand readers agree to be spied upon (“please approve our tracking cookies”) and archives circumvent that as well.  Many sites also feature adblocker-blockers, and since my brain can’t handle being bombarded with ads that blink, flash, jump, drift, pop up, and otherwise assault my vertigo and aggravate my anxiety, an adblocker is non-negotiable for me if I’m to use the internet at all.  But the most important reason of all is the title of this column: link rot, the phenomenon by which once-functional links now lead to nothing because the original page has been abandoned, deleted, censored, subjected to DMCA “takedown”, or memory-holed.  The problem has always existed, but it’s getting worse thanks to many factors including increasingly-aggressive puritanism, fascist systems that increasingly favor big corporations over the small sites that once made up most of the virtual landscape, and the growing popularity of censorship.  Worst of all, not all rotted links are completely dead; some lead to articles which have been bowdlerized, edited to hide inconvenient facts, or otherwise altered from the original.  Embedded YouTube videos have their own special kinds of rot:  videos can be removed, accounts can be cancelled because some corporate bully claimed “copyright violation“, and in the past few months YouTube has suddenly started enlarging embedded videos so they no longer fit properly on the screen (the better to lure the viewer to the main site, where they can be more effectively tracked and bombarded with ads); the only way to fix this is to go into the HTML code of every single stretched video, one at a time, and manually reset the height and width to their original dimensions.  It’s bad enough having to do that with videos; on a blog as extensive as this one, repairing other rotted links is quite impossible.  So the best I can do is to ensure that going forward, readers clicking on the links I embed will be able to see the article I linked to, in the same form as when I linked it.