I finally stopped trusting those 'preserved in time' archive snapshots

We keep sharing old GeoCities mirrors like they're pure relics, but I checked one from 1999 last week and the page counter was embedded with a script that still calls out to a dead 2004 tracker. The Wayback Machine is great, but it rewrites URLs and drops some frames, so what we're looking at isn't what people actually saw. I spent 3 hours comparing a 1998 Angelfire shrine to its 2001 cached copy in the Library of Congress collection, and half the navigation links differed. Has anyone else caught a screenshot claiming to be 'original' that was clearly patched after the fact?

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wendy_murphy162mo ago

That's a fair point, but I actually see it the other way. Those snapshots are still the closest thing we have to the real deal, and a few missing links or a patched counter doesn't make them worthless, it just means we have to look at them with some common sense.

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umaadams2mo ago

Honestly, those pictures are edited so much they just tell us what people wanted you to see.

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