[quanticle]

    Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it
    will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can’t
    erase something once it’s flowed on the internet.

I wish people would stop repeating this trope. The internet does forget. Try pulling up any blog post or article that's more than two or three years old. Click on some of the links. How many of them are still up? Of the ones that are down, how many were saved by the Internet Archive?

[Darkstryder]

To me, Internet's permanentness should be treated according to Murphy's law: you should plan for everything you wish would go down to stay up indefinitely and everything you wish would stay up to go down at some point.

[agumonkey]

Internet is like the IRS, it will never forget something that resonates with its structure, but some stuff you will never find again. Your nudes and memes ? replicated everywhere and ready to spill. That amazing article about an interesting topic .. 404.

[quanticle]

As one of my friends put it, "The internet is a machine that erases everything good about you, but preserves a million copies of your worst tweet."

[seanw444]

Something that's reminded me of this: the ongoing hunt for the original "Jeff the Killer" image. Nobody can find it, despite deep digging and lots of time spent. Even content linked to a "viral" internet story is hard to come by.

[fluoridation]

Ironically it may be hard to find precisely because its edit got so massively replicated. Thus we can conclude that the most effective way for something to get lost on the Internet is to shift all discourse related to it onto something that will become much more popular.

[AnimalMuppet]

How about this: If it was valuable and you're trying to stop all unauthorized copies, then the internet never forgets. Some drivel I posted some time back on some forum somewhere? Yeah, it's probably gone.

[deafpolygon]

I think this trope is more in conjunction with the Streisand effect. Things you don't want people to see will stay up indefinitely.

[mikewarot]

Saturday Night Live did a sketch about Olivia Rodrigo's song "Drivers License", it was a hoot... you can't find it on the internet without a ton of digging.[1] It was previously freely available, now it's mostly locked behind paywalls.

Our culture is thus stolen from us, little bits at a time.

  You say forever, but I surf alone with out history

[1] https://twitter.com/nbcsnl/status/1393642340078731269