Quick: Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos? How about something you’ve written? Maybe some old sent emails in Gmail or old Gchats?



But what about anything NOT on Facebook or Google?

Most likely, you have some photos that are lost somewhere, some old posts to a message board or something you wrote on a friend’s wall, some bits of yourself that you put out there on the internet during the previous decade that is simply gone forever.

The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica. But there’s another, more minor theme to the decade: the gradual dismantling and dissolution of an older internet culture.

This purge comes in two forms: sites or services shutting down or transforming their business models. Despite the constant flurries of social startups (Vine! Snapchat! TikTok! Ello! Meerkat! Peach! Path! Yo!), when the dust was blown off the chisel, the 2010s revealed that the content you made — your photos, your writing, your texts, emails, and DMs — is almost exclusively in the hands of the biggest tech companies: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple.

The rest? Who knows? I hate to tell you, but there’s a good chance it’s gone forever.

Here’s some of what we lost during the 2010s:

Friendster

Were you on Friendster? Maybe not, but I was. In fact, my weirdest claim to internet fame is that I was Friendster user number 227 (one of the founders was a friend of a friend so I was invited early in 2002). Although the social network fell out of favor pretty quickly, it wasn’t until 2011 that it finally transformed completely into a gaming company, wiping out all vestiges of its old user profiles.

Myspace

Myspace suffered a longer, more painful death. By 2013, it became completely music-focused, although you could still log in to your old account, and your photos and data were still there. But in 2019, due to an ill-fated server migration, all pre-2015 profile content — hundreds of thousands of photos of scene hair taken with a Nikon Coolpix in a bathroom mirror — are gone forever.

Flickr

Yes, Flickr still exists. But in late 2018, Flickr was sold off by its then-owner, OATH, the AOL/Yahoo conglomerate that was bought by Verizon. The buyer was SmugMug, a photo-hosting and printing site mainly used by professional photographers. In the transition, Flickr users were given a few months to download their archives, upgrade to a paid SmugMug account, or lose all their photos except for their most recent 1,000. It’s unclear how many Flickr users had over 1,000 photos on there to begin with (with nearly unlimited free storage, it marketed itself as a good way to back up your phone’s photos), and of those, how many paid for the upgraded service and kept their collections online. It’s certainly likely that a massive amount of photos were deleted completely — some of those from people who never bothered or knew to download them.

Webshots

Webshots was founded in the mid-’90s but hit its stride in the early ’00s when digital cameras became more affordable and it was bought by CNET, then bought by American Greetings. It was sold back to its original owners, who in 2012 relaunched it as Smile by Webshots, turning it into a site for desktop wallpapers. Users were given just two months’ notice that their photos could be downloaded, migrated over to a new paid Smile account, or would be deleted permanently.

Photobucket

In 2017, Photobucket announced that “hotlinking” (hosting the photo there to display on a different website) would only be allowed for paid accounts — and the new price was $400 a year. Hotlinking feels archaic now, but hotlinking with Photobucket hosting was used for posting to message boards, blogs, or even Amazon listings, leaving the old internet pockmarked with missing photos.

Blogs

Sure, blogs still exist, but the promise of a scrappy new form of communication, open to anyone has been chewed up and spit out by social media. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and even Medium have all made the idea of a personal, updated website seem less useful to someone who just wants to post stuff about their life. The midrange of professional blogs, people who made money blogging, often in food or fashion, still thrives, but many have shifted to Instagram (one professional travel blogger told me that sponsors still prefer her blog posts to an Instagram ad). The 2013 sunsetting of Google Reader — something I used to keep track of my “blogroll” — was both a symptom and the pulling of a final plug on the heyday of personal blogs.

For the pro tier of blogs, sites like Gawker, Videogum, or the Awl, this decade was not kind either. Former Gawker writer Alex Pareene best described the changing economics of the media business plus freakish bad luck as the “death of the rude press.” We are entering the next decade without outlets for the sort of voices that defined the last one.

One strange point is that, unlike photo hosting sites, personal blog hosts managed to make it through the decade without deleting massive amounts of people’s stuff. Blogger is part of Google, which is probably the only reason it lives on life support (though in 2018, even one of the cofounders of Blogger had trouble finding anyone who still actually worked there).

WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon. LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company where it thrives.

Xanga, however, deleted the old blogs of users who didn’t pay for a pro account (you could download your old 2004 emo blog) in 2013 and now still exists only for paid users.

Tumblr’s Adult Content

Last year, Tumblr banned adult content just ahead of being sold from Verizon to WordPress. It was controversial with the users, especially with a bungled rollout that censored all sorts of SFW images. In addition to stifling one of the spaces that had been so important for young people’s exploration of and learning about sex, it also meant that years and years of content was being zapped off the face of the Earth.

AOL Instant Messenger

Officially sent to the glue factory in 2017, AIM had been replaced for most people with other, more mobile-friendly messaging services for a long time. If you remembered how to log in, you could download your old chat logs. Otherwise, they’re all lost to the sands of time.