Personal blogs, and personal personal blogs, are particularly prone to this. I've been online long enough (going into my fourth decade) that I've seen many people who were at one time quite prolific and free-ranging online ... stop being so. Some died. Some had life catch up with them. Some merely tired of the attention. Some found their interests wandering elsewhere.
Archival has value, and I'm a fan of it.
But so do privacy, and peace and quiet.
I store stuff on removable media.
Searching link submissions on Reddit is all but impossible, given that the search targets are typically just the link title itself. If you have a given URL and you want to see if there was any Reddit discussion, you'll have far better luck. (Use the "url:<urlspec>" syntax).
For self posts (that is, original content submitted to Reddit as text), the likelihood of a hit is far larger as there's much more text to search off of.
Even better: you can restrict search by the date-range presets, or if you don't mind submitting Unix timestamps, any arbitrary date specification in a signed 32-bit range. You can also restrict search by subreddit or submitter, among other criteria.
I've made ... reasonably good use of Reddit as an essay repository with the ability to recall any of somewhat over 500 items over the past decade or so, posted to a personal subreddit. It helps of course that I usually have some idea of the language I'd use, and/or repeat myself a lot.
There are limitations. Reddit doesn't index comments, and searching large subreddits or globally is now quite difficult due to the sheer volume of submissions. I wouldn't say Reddit's search is great, but used with intention, it's serviceable.
(The rest of the site is ... failing spectacularly to serve my needs, I'm not endorsing it at all. But search actually does provide utility.)
These days I find HN an even more useful personal pattern repository, thanks to Algolia and the "by:<username>" filter.
If I can remember part of the title, I always put that in quotes and if I see something I know it's not I use the term exclusion feature.
Google index works better than you think . YOu just have to remember the sub and a few keywords.
You can narrow google search by sub too
Hosting ,electricity, and bandwidth are cheap. it is more likely someone will forget to renew the domain than not be able to afford it.
What survives is completely dependent upon the values, tastes, and perspectives of the parties hosting it. Much of what the Internet contains has an extremely short shelf-life when compared to the rest of history.
yeah that's cause the stuff you see is the stuff that survived. Most artifact are lost or destroyed.
For many of us, perhaps for most of us, much of what we post will be more or less hidden in obscurity until it finally disappears forever. And, very likely our most profound insights will have the briefest endurance in a society that seems to value only small ideas, easily digested
But the consequences of having your stuff be visible can be great and there is no guarantee it will vanish on its own in any reasonable time frame. Mirror repositories can index content long after it has been deleted by the original owner.
This person vastly underestimates how permanent the internet is.
Sure, publish your personal data and it's on the internet forever, but publish a well thought out essay on identity over time and it's easily lost. Media is much, much worse.
Addressed in Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere (1973).
https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst/page/n5/m...
Early entertainment programming was also often not saved. Some present archives exist soley because audience members "pirated" copies off the air.
Preservation of commercially-motivated product is often a very low priority. (Ironic given the US's Mickey Mouse copyright legislation.)
> I don't know why she took down her blog. I hope
> it was not because she decided to embrace the
> drab adulthood she feared in her teens.