Well, so long and thanks for all the fish. A Pew Research Center study titled "When Online Content Disappears" found that between 2013 and 2023, 4 in 1 of all web pages that existed were inaccessible, indicating that our beloved Internet may be disappearing under our fingers. It will be.

Contrary to the popular perception that everything committed to the Interweb is doomed to exist forever, the study revealed that in 2013 alone 38% of the pages that existed are now lost (via the Independent). It doesn't seem to be an age-related phenomenon, either. 

In addition, the new page appears to be performing an act of disappearance — in 2023, 8 percent of the pages that existed were also found to be unavailable.

The study utilized Common Crawl, an open repository of web crawl data that archives billions of web pages and provides archives and datasets for public use. The researchers took a random sample of more than one million web pages before checking the links to see if they were still active, and large in the sky

According to the results, 23% of news pages and 21% of government websites surveyed were found to contain at least 1 broken link. However, a staggering 54% of wikipedia pages contained reference links that no longer existed. That's a lot of facts that can no longer be reasonably checked.

Given the essential role of the Internet in modern society, these results are troubling in terms of verifying information (for better or worse). With the increase in misleading AI content, losing valuable sources of pre-AI-era information will probably not help.

Compounding this slide into a dark world where verifiable information is becoming increasingly difficult to find, a recent study found that 46.9% of all Internet traffic could be attributed to bots — many of which contribute all sorts of structured information to even muddy water. You may have a problem with this.

It's on top of increasingly convincing deep fakes, and AI news summation bots are (certainly, hilariously) off the rails and the ongoing monetization of the Internet to the point where properly researched content no longer seems to matter much in the face of rampant profits. 

It leaves us looking at a future where new information is questionable, and where old, arguably "pre-fading" information is increasingly difficult to find.

Sounds like the perfect recipe for dystopia, it sounds well, it was fun, folks. If you want to check any of the outsourced links in this article for authenticity, I suggest you get it right away. At this rate, I'm sorry to say, but you just have to take our word for it.