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Why does this happen? I guess there may be two main reasons:

One is the economic reason.

The existence of a website requires servers, bandwidth, a server room, personnel to operate and maintain it, and a lot of miscellaneous regulatory and maintenance costs, all of which are costs. If there is a strategic value (for example, the need to show outside the company wants to show the information), or there is a short-term traffic value (for example, there are still more people up to see it from time to time), at the same time the company's books are not bad, then there will still be an incentive to maintain.

But if the company took a wrong turn in business and ran out of money, the whole site would simply die. For example, Renren is a typical example.

Even if the company still has money, from an operational point of view, if a webpage is not clicked by a few people all year round, it will become a burden to the company, and the most rational way from an economic point of view is to turn it off directly. Sohu, NetEase in the early years of the content of a large number of lost, as well as the collective demise of BBS represented by Tianya Forum, are the reason.

Second, the regulatory reasons.

In general, the regulation of Internet information, is from nothing to something, from lenient to strict, from strict to more strict process. The content that could legally exist before, then did not meet the regulatory requirements; or the content that could exist in gray before, then was defined as black. All these contents will be clicked off directly.

There are also cases where the polarization of public opinion has become more and more extreme with the change of times, and content that used to be "just normal" has become very sharp and sensitive in the public opinion environment, and even though it's not illegal, it may intensify the conflict and create confusion, and the regulator may ask to dispose of it.

Apart from official departments, angry netizens also act as opinion regulators at times. They may rehash something someone said inadvertently a decade or so ago, and then hold on to it, netting the person to "social death".

But the most important impact of regulation is not the handling of the regulatory authorities or the attacks of angry netizens, but the "self-censorship" of companies and individuals that they cause.

Because no one knows if a piece of content on a website or a word someone said will bring about the demise of that person years from now. The best way is to remove all these potential "time bombs", that is, to shut down the website or delete all the contents.

Of course, there are many other reasons besides the two mentioned above.

For example, shortly after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, all web content under the international domain name "yu" (short for Yugoslavia) disappeared. Another example is the disappearance of music and movie sites that were once readily available for downloading, as copyright protection was tightened. There are also organizations and individuals who, purely for their own reasons, do not want to display their information to the public anymore, so they close down their official websites or personal homepages, etc. But these reasons are secondary.

But these reasons are secondary and localized. The systematic, large-scale disappearance of Internet content as a whole is primarily due to economic laws and self-censorship.

Essentially, Internet content, like life, is governed by the theory of evolution. There is only one criterion for its existence: to garner as much attention as possible at the lowest possible cost.

When a piece of content is able to garner enough attention out of the vast amount of content on the Internet, and the cost of maintaining that content (including the economic cost, the cost of regulation, and the cost of fighting regulation) is lower than it would be otherwise, that piece of content is likely to survive on the Internet. It is only likely that it will be presented in a different way, e.g., from text to pictures, from still pictures to moving pictures, from moving pictures to videos, and in the future, possibly from two-dimensional videos to three-dimensional holographic videos, and so on. Carry this content platform will also change, from the portal to BBS, to personal blogs, to microblogging microblogging, to jitterbug video number, to the future may be a platform we do not know what.

When a content can no longer attract enough attention, or the cost of maintaining this content is higher than other ways, this content will disappear from the Internet. The collective demise of the traditional Internet, with computers as browsing terminals and web pages as carriers, is simply the inevitable result of this "evolutionary competition for information".

The secret of biological evolution is "natural selection, the survival of the fittest", and the secret of the evolution of Internet content is "information competition, attention selection, the survival of the fittest". Due to the network effect, this competition is ten thousand times more fierce and cruel than the natural world. Traditional Internet is not a single species type of extinction, but almost all the content of the overall extinction.

Every new generation of the rise of the Internet, the old Internet will collapse, time two to foil is all websites, all the content of the inescapable destiny.