How many dead links?
I’m assuming nearly 100% =(
I did a sampling recently for an unrelated project and 100% of the links I found that weren’t to youtube were dead.
TotD Freshness
The long tail of domains
- youtube.com: 1,455 Things (48% of all Things)
- twitter.com: 114 (3.7%)
- collegehumor.com 104
- video.google.com 65
- kotaku.com 37
- boingboing.net 27
- flickr.com 23
- en.wikipedia.org 21
- vimeo.com 20
- reddit.com 15
- animenewsnetwork.com 11
- newgrounds.com 11
- engadget.com 10
- fark.com 10
- frontrowcrew.com 8
- digg.com 8
- instagram.com 7
- theverge.com 7
- imgur.com 7
- forums.fark.com 7
- github.com 6
- gothamist.com 6
- ted.com 6
- nytimes.com 6
- google.com 5
- amazon.com 5
- cinemassacre.com 5
- wired.com 5
- somethingawful.com 5
[…]
50 domains tied with 2
824 domains tied with 1 (88% of all domains)
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598 out of 3030 (19%) TotDs are dead links. Measured by whether they return a response in the 400-500 range or timeout.
This is a lower bound on link rot:
- YouTube returns
200for all videos, even deleted or private ones - It doesn’t count e.g. a news article that now redirects to the website’s landing page.
@Apreche should make the Internet Archive save all the news/TotD links for a show.
2 Likes
Hey, @TheListener, mad props on all this data analysis! This kind of data and charting is totally my jam! 
1 Like
I put it on the list! New web site is moving along. Working on it for the third straight day.
TotD titles at a glance:
Last year seen, domains with 3+ Things:
2006 news.yahoo.com
2007 somethingawful.com
flicklife.com
digg.com
forums.fark.com
metacafe.com
2008 adultswim.com
abcnews.go.com
break.com
neatorama.com
dailymotion.com
2009 video.google.com
kongregate.com
2010 npr.org
wired.com
improveverywhere.com
englishrussia.com
2011 nytimes.com
newgrounds.com
cinemassacre.com
slate.com
gonintendo.com
2012 frontrowcrew.com
boston.com
ted.com
joystiq.com
2013 crunchyroll.com
2014 collegehumor.com
2015 io9.gizmodo.com
2016 gothamist.com
fark.com
arstechnica.com
2017 kotaku.com
vimeo.com
flickr.com
amazon.com
warisboring.com
engadget.com
2018 imgur.com
gizmodo.com
2020 jalopnik.com
animenewsnetwork.com
en.wikipedia.org
rockpapershotgun.com
boardgamegeek.com
2021 hackaday.com
google.com
theverge.com
github.com
boingboing.net
kickstarter.com
2022 youtube.com
instagram.com
twitter.com
reddit.com
The Listener thanks you for joining TotD week.
2 Likes
2007 was the last year of The Old Internet I think.
Yes. iPhone and Twitter were the dividing line.
Parts of it continued until 2014. We had some College Humor links then. Also lol cinemassacre.
IMO, 2005 was the final year of Ye Old Internet. That was the year when YouTube, Blip, Vimeo, Revver, etc. popped up. Watching media would never be the same after that point. Individual websites hosting GIFs, Flash cartoons, and MOVs would gradually disappear while video-sharing sites owned by large companies became an all-consuming black hole for your attention.
That is the year those things came into existence, but they didn’t really catch on immediately. Those were still the tools of nerds. YouTube wasn’t even owned by Google yet. Without people buying smartphones and having access to more bandwidth, YouTube goes nowhere.
Like most things, it is not a binary old-internet → new-internet. It has been a gradient and there are dates that can be pointed to when certain websites or trends began but then other dates when they were widely adopted enough that they either started dominating the conversation or resulted in old haunts shutting down / getting acquired. It has been a continual shift, but maybe a better categorization rather than old and new would be: old → transition era → new/current hellscape. And the stupid web3 bros are trying to make a newer-new even more hellscape-ier than what we have so far achieved!
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GeekNights by day of the year
March 17, November 1, and November 29 have the highest episode count, with 8 episodes each.
51% of the year has either 4 or 5 episodes.
December 31 is the only date without an episode.
There has been 1 leap day episode: 20120229 - Sailor Moon SuperS Movie
There are 14 other days with 1 episode. 5 of them are in September.
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September. The PAX West impact is real.
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GeekNights episodes you can sing the TMNT theme song to.
2005-12-20 Final Fantasy Advance IV
2006-01-25 Last Exile and Kagihime
2006-03-06 How to not suck at Podcasting
2006-03-29 V for Vendetta: The Comic
2006-03-30 V for Vendetta: The Movie
2006-06-19 Switching to Mac and Garage Band
2006-08-22 Silly Tabletop RPGs
2006-09-11 Origin Stories: Computing
2006-09-12 Origins Week: Videogames
2006-09-14 Origins Week: Atheism
2006-10-03 Capcom Mini Mix and DEFCON
2006-11-07 Oltremare - Merchants of Venice
2007-02-06 Videogame Difficulty
2007-02-07 Shoujo Kakumei Utena
2007-04-12 (The) Super Soaker Revolution
2007-05-03 Meta GeekBack/Listener's Choice
2007-05-08 Rescue: The Embassy Mission
2007-05-17 Crackpot Conspiracy Theories
2007-07-30 Handheld Audio Recorders
2007-10-03 Getsumen To Heiki Mina
2007-11-06 Fantasy Nintendo Dev Kit
2007-11-07 I Wanted to Like Naruto
2008-03-20 Getting Into Animation
2008-05-08 GeekNights Book Club: (The) Prince of Nothing
2008-08-06 Connecticon 2008
2008-08-18 TI-8X Calculators
2009-03-05 Laser Tag, Paintball, and Airsoft
2009-08-06 Connecticon 2009
2009-09-14 Virtual Private Networking
2010-01-07 Triumphant Return: Q&A
2010-04-14 MoCCA Festival 2010
2010-04-20 Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes
2010-05-24 "NoSQL" Databases
2010-07-27 Luke and Jared on RPGs
2010-08-02 Automatic Killing Machines
2010-08-25 Gedo Senki - Tales from Earthsea
2010-09-20 Manned Space Exploration can Wait
2010-10-04 The Mysterious Electron
2011-02-16 Mahou Tsukai Tai OAV
2011-03-08 Tales of the Arabian Nights
2011-08-09 Taluva and Reef Encounter
2011-09-28 GeekNights Worst Webcomic Contest
2011-11-17 Emily and Rym in Japan
2012-02-29 Sailor Moon SuperS Movie
2012-03-25 Tech News Roundup March 2012
2012-07-02 Hardware Lockdown and Secure Boot
2012-07-26 1Q84: Book Club Review
2012-12-03 Network Sniffing and Programmers
2013-04-22 RSS and Google Reader
2013-08-06 PAX Australia 2013
2013-08-08 GeekNights in Australia part 1
2013-08-22 GeekNights in Australia part 2
2013-08-26 Online Gambling Technology
2013-10-07 Server Room Cooling Adventures
2013-12-02 That Penny Arcade Job Posting
2013-12-10 Homesteaders and Tammany Hall
2014-03-24 When Internet Services Die
2014-06-05 Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Preview
2014-10-08 Anime We Never Reviewed
2014-11-11 Super Smash Brothers 3DS
2015-02-23 Never Trust Lenovo Again
2015-03-03 Games at PAX South 2015
2015-03-17 Games of PAX East 2015
2015-06-01 Trusting Application Downloads
2015-08-04 Conrad Kreyling and Date Nighto
2015-10-07 Colorful and Rick and Morty
2015-12-14 The Premature Death of QA
2016-03-07 Apple vs the FBI
2016-05-02 BYOC 2016
2016-07-19 Pokemon Go: Initial Thoughts
2017-07-18 How We Review Tabletop Games
2018-01-24 Mary and the Witch's Flower
2018-09-17 Upload Filters and the EU
2018-11-08 Fan/Creator Interaction
2018-12-04 Treasure Island (2018)
2019-05-13 Windows Subsystem for Linux
2019-06-10 Breaking up Big Tech Companies
2019-06-20 Pages of Pain by Troy Denning
2019-06-26 Bee and PuppyCat: Season 1
2019-07-16 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
2019-08-07 Urusei Yatsura (manga)
2019-10-16 It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
2020-04-27 RTMP Streaming Setup
2020-05-19 Rolling Stock (2011)
2020-06-18 Pencils, Pens, and Stationery
2020-06-24 Online Anime Cons are Rough
2020-08-11 How to be good at Modern Art
2020-08-25 PAX Pamir (Second Edition)
2020-10-14 Extra Olympia Kyklos
2020-12-07 Technology Longevity
2021-06-09 Cartoon and Comic Merchandise
2021-08-23 Apple, CSAM, and Privacy
2022-06-13 The Chatbot isn't Sentient
2022-07-07 GeekNights Book Club: Ninefox Gambit
2022-08-30 Single Player Tabletop Games
2022-11-21 Federated Architecture
2022-12-21 Animated Christmas Specials
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The listener never fails.
All links appearing in show notes/TotDs to date have been submitted to the Internet Archive.
That does not help with the links that are already dead, but should prevent further link rot.
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The old phrase, “when should you start something, yesterday. Second best time? Today.”