The internet is full of broken links
The older the webpage, the more likely it’s full of dead ends.
404s & Heartbreak
At one point or another, anyone who's ever used The Internet has likely come across a dead link, cursing the error message that informs you — in increasingly wacky and creative ways — that the server can’t find the page you’re looking for.
With estimates that there’s a new website built every 3 seconds, it’s not all that surprising that some online real estate turns to wasteland, especially if page creators delete or let URLs rot as readily as site builders publish them. Indeed, according to recent Pew Research Center analysis, some 38% of links from 2013 led nowhere as of October 2023.
In 2021, it was estimated that a quarter of the deep links on the NYT site were broken, while the recent Pew research found that 21% of government sites and 23% of news webpages had at least one dead link — a clear issue in the age of dis- and misinformation, when traceable sourcing is as important as ever and defunct URLs can be bought and changed to display anything at all.
The internet of (dead) things
The latest findings come as proponents of the “dead internet theory”, which posits that the web has been colonized by bots that are pumping out the majority of content that we encounter online, become more ardent. Indeed, some commentators now argue that we’ve moved into the “zombie internet” era, where once-human-operated entities are now automated content farms publishing AI-generated images of Shrimp Jesus or devout Christian flight attendants.
