Will the world’s most accessed websites, like YouTube, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, etc. ever shut down one day?
Nothing lasts forever
No way man. My favorite sites will last forever, like ask Jeeves, Yahoo Answers, Gamespy, and ICQ.
Excuse me I have to go to Sears and then Toys R Us. If Im lucky, I might stop by Blockbuster.
i dunno why don’t you Ask Jeeves
given a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone / everything falls to 0.
Unexpected Fight Club reference.
except if it clones itself indefinitely … like siberian forest trees.
Even they will go extinct eventually, on a long enough timeline.
not if we export it to other planets first ;-)
Those will die out as well.
Even the heat death of the universe is inevitable.
As unlikely as that is, it could extend their timeline … but not infinitely.
Entropy always wins.
ehh, “entropy always wins” is only valid in closed systems. the universe is not a closed system.
If you know of a way to move things into and out of the universe, I’m all ears.
i mean that if you have an infinite space, the total useable energy does not converge to zero even though it does in every small region of that space. local convergence to zero does not imply global convergence to zero. if you took Analysis 1/2 in maths university, you know that.
Definitely. Humanity won’t be around forever, and I really don’t think any of those sites will even be around for the rest of human history. I’d say 50/50 for any of them still being up in 100 years.
That’s optimistic. I wouldn’t give chatgpt even 5 years. YouTube maybe another 20.
Yeah, Wikipedia definitely has the best shot out of those 3.
@[email protected] in 5 years
I’ll give that bot a 50% chance, too
@frischkaesbagett Ok, I will remind you on Sunday May 4, 2031 at 7:31 PM UTC.
Yes. Nothing lasts forever.
For millennia, horses used to be crucial for everyday life. Nowadays, we have cars, airplanes and other CO2 emitting atrocities that made horses effectively obsolete. Before the petrochemical industry changed the world, it was very hard to imagine life without horses. When was the last time you saw someone plow a field with a horse? Oh, you haven’t even worked on the fields. Oh, boy has the world changed in unbelievable ways.
For centuries, paper letters were the standard form of long distance communication. Before the internet, it would have been pretty impossible to imagine life without letters. When was the last time you received, let alone wrote one of those? Yeah, the world has changed, now hasn’t it.
Sooner or later, all the famous sites will be obsolete, just like oil lamps, gas stoves, and quills. Currently, it’s pretty hard to imagine what that new thing would be. Usually, these changes happen gradually. Eventually, you just realize you haven’t used that old thing in a while, because you’ve been using the new thing for such a long time.
The most popular websites off 2006:
- Yahoo sites!
- Time Warner Network
- MSN-Microsoft Sites
- Google sites
- eBay
- ask Jeeves
- Myspace
i.e. the most popular sites can and will eventually die, several have in the past 20 years…
For broader context:
The oldest non-consumable product is the cymbals made by Zildjian, which are ~400 years old.
The oldest continuously made product of any kind is German beer going back ~1000 years.
The oldest continuously operating library is ~1500 years old.
The oldest continuously published / in-use text is the Rigveda collection of Hindu hymns which is ~3000-3500 years ago.
The oldest information in general that has been passed on continuously are the oral stories in Australian Aborigine culture, known as Dream Time stories that accurately describe volcanic activity that occurred ~10,000 years old.
And we first start seeing modern behavioural traits in humans (like complex tool use and art) start appearing around ~100,000 years ago.
So yeah, eventually those sites will probably die, the mmlongeat last things are usually religious, not corporate, with the only caveat being that it’s always possible we end up in a sci-fi like future where humanity manages to pull up from it’s accelerationism and stabilize into a longer term society.
AskJeeves’s bloated corpse just shut down this week.
Kinda wild that it shut down right as we hit the era where AI search engines can actually answer your conversational questions.
That might have been exactly what killed it.
The last few users who liked asking conversational search queries have now moved on to LLM chatbots, which do a better, more convincing job of it.
The oldest information in general that has been passed on continuously are the oral stories in Australian Aborigine culture, known as Dream Time stories that accurately describe volcanic activity that occurred ~10,000 years old.
I don’t know about that being the oldest. There are Native American stories in the northwest recounting huge, apocalyptic floods, which may very well be describing the Missoula Floods from 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. (It happened several times over the course of a few thousand years.)
Yeah, fair point, I just meant oldest fully verified. Like they describe the formations of specific lakes as a result of the volcanic activity and we can see that directly in the geological record.
But to your point, it would be a wild coincidence if the oldest oral tradition currently circulating also happened to be extremely straightforward to date and pinpoint. There are almost certainly older ones still in circulation.
The Web (the WWW, upon which all websites are build) is less than 40 years old… I know this may seems like an eternity to younger people but it’s younger than me and during that short period of time a lot of ‘popular’ websites have vanished already.
So, yeah, all websites will probably end up going away. Even more so those belonging to Google (like YT) who is known for not minding killing perfectly fine websites and services…
chatgpt has only been popular for about 2-3 years. it didn’t exist in 2021.
OP wasn’t born in 2021 so it seems super old to them
I feel like if Wikipedia shuts down, it will be because the Wikimedia Foundation collapsed. It is a non-zero likelihood, especially as the organization tries to outgrow its original purpose of maintaining Wikipedia. If it goes, I expect clone sites to immediately pop up. If not, it probably says something more about the health of the Internet than the usefulness of Wikipedia.
YouTube will likely remain tied to Alphabet/Google. Outside of Alphabet or the Internet dying, another risk could be that Alphabet’s media arm gets forcefully removed from the rest of the company and the new company can’t afford to host the media due to making less money on ads and having to spend more on hosting costs.
ChatGPT could easily not be around in 20 years. No one knows what AI is going to look like and an open to ask AI may not be viable by then.
IRC ftw
Yes.
Some of them will, but not over night. Take MySpace as an example, it fizzled out after losing relevance. YouTube might die one day just like MySpace and nobody will notice, because nobody used it in ages at that point. Wikipedia is a community project, maybe one day someone there fucks up and some people will start a fork that becomes more popular than the original. I’m sure there are already some Wikipedia forks, but at the moment nobody cares about those.
Nothing lasts forever. Even the universe is destined to cease being eventually.
Yes
Yes, I mean eventually the hydrogen fusion in the sun will create enough helium that the core will compress and the outer shell will expand into a red giant consuming the earth in the process but those sites will probably shut down long before that.
