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Debate: Is the Wayback Machine better for finding old geocities sites or just stumbling through dead link directories?
I spent 3 hours last night comparing the 1998 version of a fan site for The X-Files through Wayback versus a cached list from a random forum, and the Wayback clearly won for preserving images and layout, but the directory had way more obscure personal notes from the original creator - which approach do you all think gives the truer abandoned web experience?
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eric_wright775mo ago
Right, but the "junk" is kind of the whole point. I mean, I hit a directory last week for a Sonic the Hedgehog shrine from 1997, and buried in it were the creator's personal AIM logs complaining about their ISP and a scanned photo of their cat. Wayback gave me the clean page layout with the spinning GIFs, but the directory gave me the actual person behind it. You guys talk about the "abandoned web experience" but then want it all sanitized and working. The broken image icons, the dead links, the random password-protected folders - that's the real dirt. I'll take the directory's mess over Wayback's tidy ghost town any day.
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