You Cannot Delve into the Same Internet Twice
The other night I went looking for a site that I had in my bookmarks for more than 10 years. But it was gone. Eclipsed into the sun. I tried the Wayback Machine and found parts of it, but most of the images were broken.
For me it would only live in my memory, and memories tend to blur.
Links rot and domains die, but we consider the web as an archive of days of yore.
Sometimes there's even cataclismic events, entire libraries of alexandria burn to the ground without making a sound. Geocities, Myspace, Flash gaming societies. Sometimes we're lucky and are able to retrieve a restored version.
"The internet is forever," we tell kids, as a warning. "Don't do anything foolish!" At this point the only things that get memorialized on the Internet is whatever got copied and reposted multiple times. And the little wondrous stuff, that survived online for this long had perhaps not stayed the same. Something something ship of theseus.
So I save things now. It's a bit like pressing flowers.