When Enthusiasm Dies Out
With 8 billion people alive, plus many more leaving footprints, we do see a lot of traces of enthusiasm left behind
It happens in fashion: what was hot and made you shine a few years ago will look hopelessly outdated now.
It happens in every industry: your old toaster, car, TV, whatever may look like it needs to be renewed, even if it still does exactly what you bought it to do; it still works as it has always done, and was always meant to do.
It happens on the Internet: certain websites become popular, and then, a few years later, they die out and may end up closing completely.
It happens all around us, because we – the humans – are in constant movement. It may be movement on the spot, when seen from the outside – I imagine that aliens visiting us in their UFOs with some years in between may not notice such a big difference as we, ourselves, think that is there – but we can’t see it from the outside, and from the middle of it, we feel that the world is moving fast forward.
It leaves a lot of clothes behind. It still works but is no longer being use. And a lot of toasters, cars, etc., are scrapped and melted into new ones, or are simply dumped into a still unoccupied hole in the ground somewhere, for future archeologists to enjoy finding.
Books, of course, are abandoned by the millions: a few years ago, everybody had a bookshelf, with books in it. Now, almost nobody has that – so what happened to the books? Probably they circle around a bit, from the attics to the garage, to the dumpster. But they are not being read anymore, if they ever were, and now they end up being burned or used as landfill.
What is more interesting, however, is what happens to the lost projects on the Internet.
The net is so old now, that many websites have been made by people who are no longer with us on this planet, and some of those sites still exist. Sometimes they are taken over by others, so the sites are still alive, but often, the sites die with the owners.
When a website dies, it may be in a place that keeps it up. That’s what basically happens to our social media pages, that contain so much valuable information (for the social media companies, that is), so they will be reluctant to delete it. But also the relatives of the deceased profile owners may want to keep it running, as a memory.
Other kinds of websites may be closed and deleted when the paid-for period is running out, but if it is in a place where webpages can be had for free, it may just stay there.
And then there is a special case. Maybe nobody died, actually, but they just ran out of enthusiasm.
I have seen that a lot the last few days, where I have been combing the Internet for Esperanto pages, as part of making my new Substack about Esperanto – finding out that many of them were enthusiastically maintained during a period, only to be left behind at some point in time, so that they are now still there, still owned by the local Esperanto club, for instance, but nothing has happened there since 2016, or 1994, or whatever.
At times, the front page is being updated, but a lot of what is behind is getting older and older, and is, for instance announcing upcoming events that actually took place many years ago, or linking to other sites that have long ceased to exist.
Having made many websites myself throughout my life, I fully understand what is going on.
Sometimes, you get fascinated by a topic, want to tell the world about it, and you do it, see some interest, feel motivated to do more – and then, after some years of spending a lot of your life on this, you are dragged away from it. You may get married, get a new job, run into a technical problem with the web hosting provider – losing your login, being unable to upgrade to more megabytes, or whatever it could be. And while the site updates are laying low, the readers disappear.
That by itself may be completely demotivating, so you decide to just leave tha page behind, but even if you try getting it up and running again, you may not be able to attract the old readers, or any new ones, so you give up.
Organizations are popping up now and then, especially when there’s a wave of something in fashion, and they work enthusiastically with a lot of things, but gradually, they will drop out – for millions of reasons, and sooner or later, the rest of them decide that it is not the same as it was, so they stop. But for old times sake, they keep the website running. Maybe some others will appear, who are interested in taking over?
Youth departments of organizations are driven by people who become too old to be in the youth department, but the new youth isn’t interested in the topic in the same way, to the same extent, so they don’t want to maintain the website.
This has happened during about 50 years now. Every day something is started enthusiastically, and every days something is left behind.
So, the world is now full of abandoned websites, and dead links to websites that were even closed down completely. Many web apps, that could do something on the screen for you, no longer work, because the technology they used, be it Flash or Java Applets, or anything else, simply isn’t supported by modern web browsers.
Now, we have a huge consumption of energy and “rare earth minerals” and other stuff to keep the Internet up and running. All this abandoned enthusiasm on the Internet isn’t exactly contributing to minimize the consumption of that.
Also – we all keep getting confused when finding a website and then only after spending several minutes there notice, that it was last updated 20 years ago, and nothing there is still valid. Names, addresses, even books or other things for sale – nothing works anymore.
So, while the old clothes get burned, the old toasters get melted into new ones – what will ever happen to old websites? Or will they keep accumulating forever, until there’s more abandoned stuff on the net than active?
Will the Internet drown in memories?