> The original post was about natural entropy on the internet.
The post by He Jiayan was, but that post was taken down for violating regulations. TFA is largely about the censorship angle which He Jiayan specifically avoided talking about (not that it helped him).
> If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it.
Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure.
Some sites go down organically. It happens. Every site that references a figure who was once favored and is now out of favor? That doesn't happen in the Western internet.
> Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure.
The original post listed multiple people famous in China at that time (including Taiwanese celebrities) where even Bing and Google didn't get them old enough results. Sure, they return results that supposedly match the date filter, but if you actually read them, it becomes clear that Google got the publication date wrong, because much later events are mentioned in the text. Or e.g. a YouTube video from 2004, before YouTube even existed. (Actually uploaded in 2013.)
Apparently I should have specified: prominent in the West. We've already established decay in the Chinese internet, I want you to back up your assertion that the West is "in on it".
Also, even Jay Chou, who I assume is the Taiwanese celebrity you're referring to, has a bunch of sources that are clearly from those dates:
The west has almost the opposite "problem", where stuff that some people really want hidden and forgotten is replicated and spread and amplified so much that it will never be forgotten. We even have a name for this: The Streisand Effect
It really does illustrate the difference between information being forgotten and being deliberately censored. In the West the harder someone tries to censor information on the internet, the more amplified it is likely to get
The post by He Jiayan was, but that post was taken down for violating regulations. TFA is largely about the censorship angle which He Jiayan specifically avoided talking about (not that it helped him).
> If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it.
Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure.
Some sites go down organically. It happens. Every site that references a figure who was once favored and is now out of favor? That doesn't happen in the Western internet.