> certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared
It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.
It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.
Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country's largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)
It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.
I do wonder if we're rapidly entering a world where finding sources, doing research, etc is going to only be interesting to weird subcultures and everyone else will be satisfied with whatever the first Google result says, or a confident bot's fabrication.
It was always this way. Replace Google with your neighbor who owns an encyclopedia, or the local priest. Caring about research, truth, and sources has always been something that only a minority cares about.
> It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.
I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder, but still easy enough, especially if it's your job).
In fairness, a lot of content created over the past 25 years or so only exists in ephemeral digital form. Some is captured in sources that libraries subscribe to but a lot of it isn't. (Of course, libraries also subscribe to content that was never on the open web.)
It's also the case that pre-web, a lot of that sort of content was pretty much lost to time. Per a discussion, a little while back, relatively little from the BBS era is preserved because it was mostly a distributed group of hobbyists.
It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.
It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.
Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country's largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)
It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.