02022-02-22

Eleven years ago, I made a prediction:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

One year later, Matt called me on it and the prediction officially became a bet:

We���re playing for $1000. If I win, that money goes to the Bletchley Park Trust. If Matt wins, it goes to The Internet Archive.

I���m very happy to lose this bet.

When I made the original prediction eleven years ago that a URL on the longbets.org site would no longer be available, I did so in a spirit of mischief���it was a deliberately meta move. But it was also informed by a genuine feeling of pessimism around the longevity of links on the web. While that pessimism was misplaced in this case, it was informed by data.

The lifetime of a URL on the web remains shockingly short. What I think has changed in the intervening years is that people may have become more accustomed to the situation. People used to say ���once something is online it���s there forever!���, which infuriated me because the real problem is the exact opposite: if you put something online, you have to put in real effort to keep it online. After all, we don���t really buy domain names; we just rent them. And if you publish on somebody else���s domain, you���re at their mercy: Geocities, MySpace, Facebook, Medium, Twitter.

These days my view towards the longevity of online content has landed somewhere in the middle of the two dangers. There���s a kind of Murphy���s Law around data online: anything that you hope will stick around will probably disappear and anything that you hope will disappear will probably stick around.

One huge change in the last eleven years that I didn���t anticipate is the migration of websites to HTTPS. The original URL of the prediction used HTTP. I���m glad to see that original URL now redirects to a more secure protocol. Just like most of the World Wide Web. I think we can thank Let���s Encrypt for that. But I think we can also thank Edward Snowden. We are no longer as innocent as we were eleven years ago.

I think if I could tell my past self that most of the web would using HTTPS by 2022, my past self would be very surprised …���though not as surprised at discovering that time travel had also apparently been invented.

The Internet Archive has also been a game-changer for digital preservation. While it���s less than ideal that something isn���t reachable at its original URL, knowing that there���s probably a copy of the content at archive.org lessens the sting considerably. I couldn���t be happier that this fine institution is the recipient of the stakes of this bet.