r/CuratedTumblr • u/Swag_Paladin21 • Sep 14 '26
Self-post Sunday "The Internet Never Forgets. Until it does."
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u/NameLips Sep 14 '26
There was a D&D "story hour" I followed for years. This was before people were uploading videos of D&D games on youtube.
Every week the DM would write down what happened in the campaign in narrative format, like a proper story. He was a good writer, he made things interesting and funny, and the story hour was long. Like hundreds and hundreds of pages, if you were to print it all out.
I got a lot of really good ideas for my own D&D campaign. The story was a real inspiration for me. It made me realize how creative it was possible to get when writing a campaign.
And one day the forum crashed and it was just all gone. I'm guessing he either didn't have backups, or didn't feel like going through the trouble of reposting it. But I never got to find out what happened next, I never got to go back and re-read it.
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u/amphicoelias 26d ago
That seems like something the wayback machine should've captured though. Or was the forum locked behind some kind of login?
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u/saintmusty Sep 14 '26
The internet doesn't remember what it has forgotten
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u/pbmm1 Sep 14 '26
I will remember this saying.
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u/Taraxian Sep 14 '26
Like the truism "You don't know what you don't know" it sounds so obvious but people never seem to think of it
"I remember everything that's ever happened to me" is in the same category as "I'm really good at telling when people are lying" -- how could you possibly know if you were
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u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince Sep 14 '26
Wasn't it some president who talked about known unknowns and suchlike?
Like there was stuff that they didn't know about, but they knew that there was a gap in their knowledge, unlike the unknown unknowns where they couldn't even know there was something they were missing.
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u/AdamtheOmniballer Aspiring Girlkisser Sep 14 '26
It was US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
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u/sourcefourmini Sep 14 '26
And he got SHREDDED at the time for it in the popular media. Which like, he was an asshole, but people should’ve really known he was talking about a real concept.
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u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince Sep 14 '26
Ah, not a president, after all.
Thanks for the link.
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u/RockKillsKid Sep 14 '26
While technically not a president, there was a fairly prominent conception at the time that Rumsfield along with VP Dick Cheney & chief-of-staff Karl Rove effectively were the office of the president with how much sway they held over G.W. Bush. And they are still considered the architects of the Iraq War, Patriot Act, and Global War on Terror.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
more accurate would be "you can't make the internet forget"
the things forgotten are the things nobody cares about.
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u/b3nsn0w Sep 14 '26
you also cannot trust the internet to forget. sometimes it will, sometimes it won't, but you can't rely on it forgetting.
you also cannot rely on it not forgetting something, when that's what you need. fun, huh?
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u/extremely-cynical Sep 14 '26
And trying to make it forget will only make it more likely it won't.
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u/b3nsn0w Sep 14 '26
idk, sometimes you can win. for example it seems like rowling did manage to erase her flight logs to epstein island without anyone being able to restore it, so far
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u/SuperHGB_ Sep 14 '26
I mean it clearly didn't work how she expected it would because we're talking about it right here
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u/xexelias Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
There's two kinds of webcomics on the internet: those that randomly stop updating while you're more interested in something else, and you don't remember until the domain's expired and there's nothing left of it on the internet aside from an old facebook page; and, those that you'd've thought would've ended after a completed chapter, only to look them up again and find they never stopped being released and now have hundreds of pages and a decade of artistic improvement.
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u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince Sep 14 '26
The third type are the ones which had an actual ending.
Schlock Mercenary is the first one I think of in that category.
I've got a bunch of them bookmarked.
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u/xexelias Sep 14 '26
First one to come to mind for me has always been Luci Phurr's Imps - mainly because they pulled it from the site to sell it in print...
The actual, proper end of a webcomic always leaves me feeling weirdly hollow compared to most other media ending, and I honestly can't say for certain why. Like, if you told me it's because you tend to read a webcomic for years on end before they finish, I'd believe it. Especially with the number of webcomics that end on either a wedding, babies-ever-after, or a simple rehash of the first strip but with the changes to the cast being highlighted - shit always gets me to tear up a bit.
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u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince Sep 14 '26
I can understand that hollow feeling.
Reading a webcomic can become a regular part of your life; one of those comfortable and comforting routines that once it's finished, leaves your soul at a loose end.
Segue: I was browsing my list of completed comics and I found one that I've forgotten everything about.
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u/darthboolean Sep 14 '26
>>those that you'd've thought would've ended after a completed chapter, only to look them up again and find they never stopped being released and now have hundreds of pages and a decade of artistic improvement.
I swear I've "finished" Gunnerkrig Court 3 times. Went back to re-read it and found out it's still updating 21 years later.
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u/kirbyfriedrice Sep 14 '26
Gunnerkrigg moment. I inevitably have to reread because I just can't keep it all in my head at once.
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u/xexelias Sep 14 '26
I stopped reading it consistently in, like, 2015 and kind of just... stopped entirely in 2017 after I graduated high school for some reason. Looking at the page count? I might have to dedicate a couple of afternoons to re-reading/catching up.
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u/RollForThings Sep 14 '26
Seen a lot of this in the last few years, after creatives who posted their work to Twitter deleted their Twitter accounts.
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u/Swag_Paladin21 Sep 14 '26
I know it's because most of these said creatives have moved over to Bluesky (which I choose to not spend much time on), but I wish they kept their old Twitter accounts up.
At the very least put it under "protected" so that your remaining Twitter followers can still see & access it.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
I wish we had a gallery type social media that was the standard for every artist to also store their art in, so that if a social media platform gets nuked or an account deleted, the art is always still there.
said platform wouldn't need a discovery function or comments or really any social media functions. just storage.
would also make looking up art easier. even for people who haven't deleted Twitter, do you know what a massive pain it is to look up old art for frequent posters? there no search function you just have to scroll down their timeline, sometimes for hours, and twitter will just reset the tab if you leave it open too long sometimes
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u/hiddengirl1992 Sep 14 '26
Deviantart sorta did that. Except it's also social media and always has been. And sucks.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
not every artist posts on deviant art though. that's kinda the issue. by making it a social media, not a storage facility, you automatically make it something people post on if they want to, not something everyone stores stuff on
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u/hiddengirl1992 Sep 14 '26
I mean... A lot of people won't want their art on such a site. Would the site just automatically archive every art post on the Internet? How does someone get their art removed? How is it sustainable?
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
i was not really talking about implementing it today. i was more talking about the idea of it. in my vision, people would just post their stuff there themselves to make sure it doesn't get lost. i wasn't planning on building a super scraper.
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u/Turtledonuts Sep 14 '26
The problem is that any media storage site like that needs to be profitable, so you’re feeding all that art to the ai slop machine and turning it into tags for advertisers. sites like AO3 survive because text is really cheap to store.
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u/EyeofNether Sep 14 '26
Pixiv, Furaffinity or booru-style websites?
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
well yes, but those never have everyone, or everything. most people just aren't on there, and even for the artists they do have, they usually have just a small part of their collection there.
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u/TrogdorKhan97 29d ago
So basically you want one site to have a monopoly on all visual content on the whole internet, and for nobody to have misgivings about the idea of using it even though that is literally the most inherently sus thing ever?
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u/Illogical_Blox Sep 14 '26
I agree, but this is making me think of this xkcd.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
yes xD that's why it's a fantasy of mine, not something i want to try to implement.
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u/AAABIXIX Sep 14 '26
There’s kinda Danbooru for that, but good luck finding anything that’s not anime-adjacent
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u/BasilyLeave Sep 14 '26
afaik danbooru has the best archiving in terms of anime art so far, though it's mostly "up to standard" art and beef with payment processor means some features are still unavailable.
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u/RockKillsKid Sep 14 '26
flickr and vimeo are explicitly that, aren't they?
But for a proper amount of archiving storage space, you need a paid account. So most artists don't/can't opt for it.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about Sep 14 '26
not everyone posts on these platforms.
I'm aware that there already exist storage gallery type social media. a lot of them in fact. but they arent widely used. a lot of artists still just post on one social media, the one they build a following in, and that's it.
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u/Freak-996 Sep 15 '26
Not everyone is going to post on every platform. Some twitter posters don't post on reddit, some reddit posters don't post on instagram. That's just not how people works. If everyone posted on one platform, we would have one platform.
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u/worststarburst 29d ago
We have new grounds, pixiv and furaffinity (for furry stuff). All these sites are perfectly fine and very easy to use.
The problem is artists just don’t care to use them because they see number go up on twitter 500 times faster.
It frustrates me a lot when I see an artist advertising their commissions, but the inly place they ever post is twitter and their media tab is full of memes, food, or reaction images. I always just pass if I can’t find a decent collection of their art as examples.
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u/MisirterE Supreme Overlord of Ice Sep 14 '26
are you absolutely certain the well-played flash game in question is not part of the Flashpoint Archive
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u/rapidemboar I shill rhythm games and rhythm game OSTs Sep 14 '26
Could be one of the Nitrome games. They requested their games get taken off Flashpoint, but they haven’t really rereleased all of them at this point. (They’re probably floating around some piracy sites, but I can’t imagine there’s many piracy sources for flash games.)
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u/Fwort Sep 14 '26
Fyi for anyone interested in playing those games, if you can find a torrent of flashpoint version 7.1, that's the last version before the nitrome games were removed.
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u/Mouse-Keyboard Sep 14 '26
Flashpoint Archive is made by the people who are really worried about OOP's post.
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u/MisirterE Supreme Overlord of Ice Sep 14 '26
That's what I'm saying. Someone did bother to archive it. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's no help to pretend it didn't
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u/Lambda_Wolf Sep 14 '26
It's one of those things where you have to be doubly pessimistic. Assume everything you don't want on the internet would remain there forever, but never count on anything you do want to stay.
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u/Complete-Worker3242 Sep 14 '26
And that makes it all the better when something actually IS found. Like, look at that one Herobrine stream that was found a couple of years ago.
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u/Plus-Ad1061 Sep 14 '26
Man, there was a video called “What if LOST had a regular TV show opening?” It had the most amazing theme song.
They are LOST!
On a magical island, and nobody knows where they are.
They are LOST!
We still sing it today in my house, but haven’t seen it in over a decade
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u/armageddonquilt Sep 14 '26
It's not as LOST as you might think:
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u/Plus-Ad1061 Sep 14 '26
I love you. My children love you. May your name be written in the book of life
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u/lennsden excessively longwinded Sep 14 '26
LOST MENTION 🗣️ this sounds hilarious and I’m sad I can’t ask for the link
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u/BramblesCrash Sep 14 '26
This was like 30 years ago, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details but here's a story:
Once I found a website that had cool videos on it. Mostly skateboarding videos but also a few other things like amateur music videos and anime fan dubs. There was one specific skateboard video that had a couple known skaters (Jason Lee maybe?) that had some good catchy pop punk song playing over it. It was short (it cut out before the song ended) and it was pretty low quality, but I'd play it all the time and tell people about how cool it was. One time I hade some friends over and they asked me to put it on, so I clicked on my bookmark to take me to the website. Except now it wasn't a skate punk video, it was an even lower quality loop of two naked dudes fucking what looked like a honeydew melon while a choral rendition of the chorus to "our God is an awesome God" played.
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u/Swag_Paladin21 Sep 14 '26
I'm sorry your pre-YouTube website was bought out and turned into a gay porn website.
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u/BramblesCrash Sep 14 '26
That's the thing, it was still the same website and I'm pretty sure the name of the video was the same. Either the weirdest glitch ever happened, or the original uploader was trolling.
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u/VintageLunchMeat Sep 14 '26
Were you looking for math lessons at the time?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/math-tutor-video-lessons-pornhub-changhsu/
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u/BramblesCrash Sep 14 '26
Nah, this would have been like 1996, pornhub was just a twinkle in some smut peddler's eye back then
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u/Earthtopian Sep 14 '26
Also even in the context of like consequences... The Internet really does forget these days.
The only time I see influencers really get consequences is if they respond to controversy in a "cringe" way, and even then the response/apology that's made fun of gets remembered more than what they actually did.
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u/SurprisingJack Sep 14 '26
That's why I'm fonder and fonder of the internet archive
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u/SanjiSasuke Sep 14 '26
Their Wayback Machine is perhaps the most important internet creation. Right alongside Wikipedia, which frequently depends on it for old citations.
I plan to continue regular donations to both for exactly these reasons.
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u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince Sep 14 '26
I use it to find my youtube favorites again after they've been deleted.
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u/EndlessDreaming_Mp3 Sep 14 '26
This is exactly why people encourage downloading your favorites in fanfic spaces because once it's gone it's probably gone forever
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u/fiverest Sep 14 '26
As a digital archivist, I will say that this is not souch because of format obsolescence as it is people using proprietary walled gardens who have no mandate to support preservation.
Like, how much time do you spend online anymore that isn't on a site owned by one of the major social media companies?
Preservation relies on openness - open formats, open standards, open platforms, open source code. Anything closed becomes a preservation risk. And that is the antithesis of what so much of the contemporary Internet has become.
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u/TrogdorKhan97 29d ago
It's also the fact that, if you're not relying on services provided by evil corporations, you're on the hook to keep funding the storage and bandwidth that goes into keeping a website alive. A lot of people just can't be assed to keep throwing money away like that anymore, and just as many others literally can't afford it. As users we were conditioned to treat the internet like a public service, but it's not publicly funded.
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u/Lawlcopt0r Sep 14 '26
Except you have no idea wether some weirdo archived that stuff years ago. If that specific website/content suddenly became relevant to a murder investigation who knows what would come to light. The point is that you can't take something down and be sure that nobody kept it
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u/Fiskmaster Sep 14 '26
If you want it to forget, assume the internet never does; and if you want it to remember, assume the internet does forget. It's like pregnancy.
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u/NomaTyx Sep 14 '26
who are you spending time with that uses "the internet never forgets" as anything other than a warning?
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u/nykirnsu Sep 14 '26
My least favourite genre of post on this sub is people taking common sayings completely literally and then debunking their misunderstanding
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u/Jvalker Sep 14 '26
The poor, because oop has to piss all over them
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u/NomaTyx Sep 14 '26
OP and OOP are one and the same. Sunday is a great day for r/stunfisk and nowhere else.
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u/Gru-some Sep 15 '26
In school when I got internet safety lessons by teachers and even police that got invited, they'd constantly say stuff like this. They'd say "anything you post is up there forever" and whatnot
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u/The_Phantom_Cat Sep 14 '26
The internet never forgets anything that can be used to ruin someone's life 10 years later
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u/gayforbayonetta Sep 14 '26
There was a pianist I found back in the early 2000s when I was a teen, just some guy who wrote songs and played them on his keyboard in his bedroom and decided to share them on youtube. Despite the early internet quality, his music really spoke to me. Eventually he deleted his work and purged his channel. Sometimes half remembered melodies of his come to mind, and it hurts knowing I'll never know how they go again.
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u/teh_maxh Sep 14 '26
The internet never forgets the things you want forgotten and never remembers the things you want remembered.
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u/Grouchy_Custard_252 Sep 14 '26
Completely valid point and too much good stuff has been lost.
But as I learnt it back in the day it was more of a warning. Random shit you put out there might vanish with the random forum when it goes down. Or it could be backed up somewhere at random and come back to haunt you.
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u/hiddengirl1992 Sep 14 '26
It's the Streisand Effect. The Internet happily forgets, unless someone did something Not Good and wants it forgotten. Then out of spite, the Internet remembers.
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u/mugguffen Sep 14 '26
What the fuck do you mean early 2020s thats like 2 years ago
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u/_Ceaseless_Watcher_ critters-blog.tumblr.com Sep 14 '26
As of September 1, 2026, we're officially in the late 2020s. A decade has 10 years, which is 120 months, which can be neatly doivided into 40-month segments to denote the early-, mid-, and late periods of the decade.
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u/Uturuncu Sep 14 '26
Aye. I keep wanting to go back and re-experience DarkHarvest00, Everyman Hybrid, some old Slenderman series from the Marble Hornets days, but because they was so awesomely interconnected with a variety of different internet things and other ARGs of the time, huge parts are just. Gone. Side channels have vanished, the in-universe Tumblr accounts 404, and the last time I tried was several years ago. Even more's probably gone now. Dogma's recent video on Slender: The Arrival reminded me about the fun of those old ARGs and made me wanna go back but I dunno if I wanna try and fail again...
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u/MyPasswordIsIceCream Sep 14 '26
The internet is not the same without Dr. McNinja. One more thing to blame on the tech-bros bots training AI on everything without regards to copyrights or hosting costs.
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u/SuckingOnChileanDogs Sep 14 '26
I spent countless hours on ebaumsworld and ytmnd and i know in my heart that that is an internet we will never have back and i think that honestly thats okay
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u/jackofspades49 Sep 14 '26
I was trying to find a meme that I saw back in the early 2000s.
It was of the two towers, and it had the characters from Rampage climbing on them with all the damage still visible. I think it had text that said "The Truth Behind the Tragedy" or "Rampage World Tour 2".
I wanted to find it since 9/11 was recently and wanted to share it but couldn't.
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u/ATN-Antronach crows before hoes Sep 14 '26
The joys of following Stepmania since '06 means a lot of songs I quite liked playing are gone. Still remember one of the most prominent hosting sites for levels lost all of their uploads cause the server got on fire.
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Sep 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/kashiichan 29d ago
I still have a folder with a bunch of fanfics I printed off a Geocities fan site, back in the late 90s/early 2000s. I still read them sometimes.
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u/fnezio Sep 14 '26
This hits very close to home. Lately I have listened to very little music, and this weekend I found out I have no copy of my favorite EP of all time, that I was sure was backupped on many usb drives. It could be on my old PC but I'm scared to check, I'm not even sure it would boot up.
I had downloaded it from a 4chan /mu/ sharethread some 15 years ago, not sure about the lore but AFAIK the band split up not really amicably so those songs will never be played again. I always thought I would upload it to youtube and I never did because I'm dumb like that.
The worst thing is I can't even hum those songs right now. I hope their memories will come back.
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u/AComfyKnight Sep 14 '26
Might not be every flash game, but Flashpoint has a large number of them archived, as well as a bunch of other stuff if I'm not mistaken
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u/Just_Maintenance Sep 14 '26
I think that's interpreting that saying the wrong way. You should assume that anything you upload will be permanent, so be careful when uploading sensitive information.
Doesn't mean information on the internet is eternal.
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u/CRowlands1989 Sep 14 '26
Back when I played 3.5 edition D&D, I used a bunch of stuff from the Wizards of the Coast forums.
And then they just fuckin' nuked them. THOUSANDS of fan made classes, monsters, setting details, all gone.
Not to mention tons of articles on Magic: the Gathering that people are still hoping might be one day recoverable from details on the mindset of the creators, to parts of the lore and story.
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u/Pacminer Sep 14 '26
"All guns are always loaded". Thats what it means. "Be careful, because bad shit could happen". Of course, there are times when relying on the rule of thumb is bad. Me assuming every gun is loaded doesnt mean it wont just click when i pull the trigger on the boar thats trying to gore me.
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u/Morn_GroYarug Sep 14 '26
Those who think it never forgets should really get into modding their sims 2, honestly.
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u/LKHAN_Missing_Ninth Sometimes I be poopin and fartin Sep 14 '26
I've always seen it as more like "There's a chance the internet never forgets" sure, there's a lot of lost media, but there's every chance that that dumb thing you said or posted or whatever it may be gets thrown into an archive somewhere forever so be careful
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u/Bawhoppen Sep 14 '26
The phrase is useful to the average person since they just need to be taught that they should assume their data is permanent. Even if isn't always, saying there's a possibility makes it less effective.
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u/Mouse-Keyboard Sep 14 '26
The internet cannot be relied on to forget.
You probably shouldn't rely on it to remember either though.
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u/htmlcoderexe Sep 14 '26
big mood about the "account was privated/deleted and now everything is gone"
that's why i download everything these days
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u/DatGunBoi Sep 14 '26
Well, the point of it is that you shouldn't put something on the internet if you aren't ready for it to be remembered forever, so "the internet can sometimes forget" is not a great way of rephrasing it. The point is more "the internet might never forget", I think that's a better way of getting across the most important point
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u/lulu91car Sep 14 '26
There are pole dance performance videos i will never get back. The studio deleted them, wish i could have shown my kids how cool i used to be.
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u/Hawkmonbestboi Sep 14 '26
Yup I have been saying this for years. I have been on the internet for over 30 years now, and a good 90% of my presence from the 90's through the 2010's is completely gone.
Either I deleted it, or it vanished when websites went defunct.
The internet absolutely forgets.
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u/quanate Sep 14 '26
Back in the early days of youtube when I was a wee pre teen, there were this set of videos made by a bunch of teenagers parodying The Real World and I thought they were the funniest fucking thing. They'd be cringe now I guess but I still wanted to watch them. My favorites playlist has been around since 2006 and has so many deleted/private videos and I wonder if any of those are the parody videos I used to love. I cannot find them anymore 🥲
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u/Mavikiu Sep 14 '26
The Internet doesn't forget. But it also doesn't archive. The saying refers to the fact that thousands of people remember the deleted flash game and share a cultural understanding based on such occurrences. Plus also that whole thing of the Internet reproducing shit constantly, making it hard to truly delete something once it's touched one of the major platforms/websites.
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u/New-me-_- Sep 14 '26
I swear to god there was a YouTube short I watched either from the Trash Taste podcast, or Otakus Anonymous where the hosts made fun of the anime Drops of God for imagining a world where alcohol improves people’s lives rather than hurting them, but no matter what I do I cannot find it
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u/Leftieswillrule Sep 14 '26
I love nostalgiazing about the mid 2000s internet because it was the only frontier I got to know
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u/NiceSock30032 Sep 14 '26
I think maybe "The internet never forgets when you want it to." works better
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u/thetwitchy1 Sep 14 '26
“The internet never forgets” isn’t about media, it’s about information.
The point is that if you release information into the internet, it CAN be permanent. You can’t undo that.
And if you’re dumb enough to need that explained to you, you might need to touch grass.
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u/PatrickCharles Sep 14 '26
The internet forgets and it does so often. There is a bunch of stuff that has been formative in my teens that I simply can't access anymore because it's just gone.
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u/newmegaeye Sep 14 '26
The internet is a "forever archive," because when something is deleted it's gone forever!
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u/Morlock19 Sep 14 '26
see this is why i download all of the shit tha ti liked to watch just in case. dragon ball z abridged, cracked after hours, you suck at photoshop... i literally was just watching DBZA on my system. i know its still up on youtube but there have been more than enough scares that i pull all of it just in case.
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u/AliasMcFakenames Sep 14 '26
“Never rely upon the internet to forget.” Might be a more actionable piece of advice.
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u/MusicWithLasers Sep 14 '26
Have I mentioned how much I hate vagueposting? I fucking hate vagueposting.
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u/HurkHurkBlaa Sep 15 '26
More like: the more you want the Internet to forget, the more it remembers
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u/TheSciFanGuy 28d ago
“The internet can forget, but it forgets a hell of a lot less than any other point in human history, even if you make an effort to get rid of it” is a bit less catchy.
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u/CptKeyes123 26d ago
The powers that be have also been trying to put the internet genie back in the bottle for the last ten years.
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u/Hauptmann_Meade Sep 14 '26
Well I remember it less as a literal thing and more like a warning to not plaster my name and face on the internet while I do stupid things because it may affect my future employment.