A 2011 Bet That the Original URL Would Die by 2022
"The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years." (2011)
In 2011, Keith and Haughey made a $1,000 bet on longbets.org: would the original URL for their prediction still work in 2022? Keith argued that link rot is the entropy of the web, making survival unlikely. Haughey countered that with mature technology and strategies, stable URIs are within reach. The bet's terms specified that on February 22, 2022, the URL must return an HTML page containing the exact prediction text, with a 301 redirect also acceptable. The outcome would decide which charity received the money.
Cool URIs don't change wrote Tim Berners-Lee in 01999, but link rot is the entropy of the web.
- mg
It is actually pretty easy to keep alive URLs if there is a will to do so. Just have tests in place so you can't mess them up accidentally. And convert things that are not changing anymore to static html.
One of my first web projects involved a music forum and I have been keeping the URLs alive for 24 years now:
https://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/
I feel like I owe it to the people who participated to keep it online forever. Also as a document of history.
- CSMastermind
It's worth noting that some prediction URLs, for instance: https://longbets.org/6/ are offline.
The original long bet was whether or not computers could pass the turing test by 2029: https://longbets.org/1/
You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
https://longbets.org/9/ is another interesting one depending on whether you think covid leaked from a lab or not.
- JoshTriplett
> entering the characters http://www.longbets.org/601 into the address bar of a web browser or command line tool (like curl)
The part of this that's most likely to fail at some point is the "http://".
- matsemann
At a certain bet size it would almost be self-fulfilling, heh, as one side would be very incentivized to keep at least that url working (buying the domain + hosting it if the page were to die)
- firefoxd
One thing I've done is include my redirect rules with the web application. So my links continue to work even when I change them and forget them.
- vvoyer
Amazing that Disqus comments are still live for this page. More impressive even than the website itself being live.
- phil-pickering
Some nice posts about his prediction on Jeremy Keith's blog:
- sucuri2
Anyway to find all bets expiring this year? it will be interesting to see. Could not find a way to search for it there.