Link rot

Link rot is the gradual decay of hyperlinks on the World Wide Web — the process by which URLs cease to resolve to valid resources as servers fail, domains expire, content is deleted, or platforms restructure their addressing schemes. It is not a technical failure but a structural feature of the web's design: HTTP has no built-in versioning mechanism, no persistence guarantee, and no canonical way to update references when a resource moves. Link rot is therefore the entropy of digital memory — the inevitable dissolution of connections in a system that was designed for communication, not preservation. The Wayback Machine and Web archiving initiatives are attempts to slow this decay, but they cannot stop it; they merely preserve static snapshots of a dynamic system, and the gap between the snapshot and the lived experience is the space where link rot does its most insidious work.