Just hit 500 old website links saved in my bookmarks folder

I was cleaning out my bookmarks last night because my browser was lagging. I clicked into my folder labeled 'old web stuff' and saw I had exactly 500 links saved. That number surprised me because I didn't realize I had been hoarding that many old sites for years. Most of them are from the late 90s and early 2000s. Things like Geocities fan pages, old school forum archives from a niche gaming community I was in, and random personal blogs that haven't been updated since 2003. It felt weird because so many of those links probably don't even work anymore. I clicked on a few just to check and about half were dead pages. Has anyone else run into a big pile of old bookmarks that made you realize how much of the internet has just vanished?

2 comments

2 Comments

andrew714d ago

That really hits home with the 'so many of those links probably don't even work anymore' part. Its wild how the internet feels permanent but its actually more like a constantly shifting sand dune. I see this with my own browsing habits too - not just bookmarks but old forum threads, youtube comments from 2009, even entire websites that just vanish overnight. Feels like we're all building a giant library with pages that literally turn to dust every year. You stumble on a dead link and its like finding a ghost town where everyone just upped and left. Makes you wonder what future generations will think when they look back at our digital history.

baker.phoenix13d ago

You ever had a buddy who saved ALL his bookmarks from like 2005? My friend Dave finally went through his old laptop last year and found links to his old Geocities band page, a fan forum for a show that ended in 2003, and a recipe blog his mom wrote. He clicked maybe 2 out of 20 that actually loaded, and the rest were just 404 errors. It was like opening a time capsule full of nothing but dust.