[equestria]

In my experience, it's more common than we suspect. I've met quite a few people in their 60s with fascinating hobbies. Some of it boils down to the fact that they had many decades to get good - and with career in the rearview mirror and adult children, they have a lot more time, too.

But it's also true that with age, you lose the drive to get praise from strangers - so at best, you get a text website viewed by hundreds, not a series of TikTok or YouTube videos viewed by millions. And sometimes, not even that website.

When that person dies and leaves behind a man-sized vacuum tube computer, or a collection of vintage calculators, or something of that sort... the heirs usually don't have the willpower to carry on, and because the stuff is impossible to sell, it's often destined for the dump. Maybe a couple of years in a storage unit before that.

It's even worse with digital assets. Who's gonna renew that hobby domain or pay that hosting bill? I've seen some really valuable online resources disappear after the author died.

[anyfoo]

> Who's gonna renew that hobby domain or pay that hosting bill? I've seen some really valuable online resources disappear after the author died.

This is why the Internet Archive is so important.

[equestria]

Eh, kinda. It technically preserves content, but it has almost zero discoverability. The site disappears from Google & co, so unless you come across a dead link in some old HN or Reddit thread, you won't even know it's there.

[8bitsrule]

Yep. It helps IA that there are people keeping track of old URLs and making sure that they get added to the store.

One thing they've added to their extension lately is a count of how many times a page/site has been saved. If one finds a great resource with a no- or low-count, it can be added at your request; sometimes it will ask if you want to save the page.

[anyfoo]

I didn't say it's sufficient, but without the preservation that the Internet Archive does, we'd be completely lost.

I have come across some wealth of deeply technical information by entering dead links on still live pages in the wayback machine, and then following crosslinks from there to further old sites. I shudder to think what would have been if I hadn't found the dead links in those cases, and I'm sure I still missed a lot because I didn't know it was there. So yes, this is a very real problem.

[8bitsrule]

"so at best, you get a text website viewed by hundreds, not a series of ... videos viewed by millions."

As my music-maker friend once put it, "it's not so important much how many like it, but who likes it."

[djmips]

Or put a couple million into your stinky living computer museum!