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this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Ask Lemmy
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The most popular websites off 2006:
i.e. the most popular sites can and will eventually die, several have in the past 20 years....
For broader context:
The oldest non-consumable product is the cymbals made by Zildjian, which are ~400 years old.
The oldest continuously made product of any kind is German beer going back ~1000 years.
The oldest continuously operating library is ~1500 years old.
The oldest continuously published / in-use text is the Rigveda collection of Hindu hymns which is ~3000-3500 years ago.
The oldest information in general that has been passed on continuously are the oral stories in Australian Aborigine culture, known as Dream Time stories that accurately describe volcanic activity that occurred ~10,000 years old.
And we first start seeing modern behavioural traits in humans (like complex tool use and art) start appearing around ~100,000 years ago.
So yeah, eventually those sites will probably die, the mmlongeat last things are usually religious, not corporate, with the only caveat being that it's always possible we end up in a sci-fi like future where humanity manages to pull up from it's accelerationism and stabilize into a longer term society.
AskJeeves's bloated corpse just shut down this week.
Kinda wild that it shut down right as we hit the era where AI search engines can actually answer your conversational questions.
That might have been exactly what killed it.
The last few users who liked asking conversational search queries have now moved on to LLM chatbots, which do a better, more convincing job of it.
I don't know about that being the oldest. There are Native American stories in the northwest recounting huge, apocalyptic floods, which may very well be describing the Missoula Floods from 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. (It happened several times over the course of a few thousand years.)
Yeah, fair point, I just meant oldest fully verified. Like they describe the formations of specific lakes as a result of the volcanic activity and we can see that directly in the geological record.
But to your point, it would be a wild coincidence if the oldest oral tradition currently circulating also happened to be extremely straightforward to date and pinpoint. There are almost certainly older ones still in circulation.