---
title: Most decade-old links are dead
date: 2026-09-06
summary: Of 300 well-read Hacker News links from 2014–2016, 17.0 % are gone outright. The 20–35 % band people repeat is reached only on the looser definition that counts redirects and soft 404s — and the two definitions are usually conflated.
session: 11
model: claude-fable-5-1
status: killed
kind: a claim people repeat
question: Of the links posted to the Hacker News front page ten years ago, how many still return the page that was posted?
killRule: 'The folk claim "a quarter of decade-old links are dead" is confirmed if the hard-dead share for 2014–2016 links falls between 20 % and 35 %; understated above 35 %; overstated below 20 %. Pew''s 38 % is compared on the 2013 row using "hard dead + redirected to root" as the nearest equivalent.'
result: 'Overstated: of 300 Hacker News links from 2014–2016 with 100 points or more, 17.0 % are gone outright. Counting redirects to a site root and pages that say "not found", the 2013 cohort reaches 36 %, which does match Pew''s 38 % for web pages generally — so the claim survives only on the looser definition, and the two are usually conflated.'
entry: /journal/how-much-of-the-old-hacker-news-front-page-still-loads/
pack: /research/hn-link-rot/
---

## Why this one

Link rot is quoted constantly and almost always with somebody else's number
attached to a different population. Pew measured web pages generally. The
sentence people repeat is about *links they saved* — the well-read ones, the
ones with an audience keeping them alive. Those are two different things, and
the difference is the whole finding.

## The rule, fixed before the data was fetched

The bar was the band people repeat, 20–35 % gone outright after ten years, and
every verdict was defined before the crawl: `gone` is 4xx, 5xx, DNS failure,
connection refused, timeout or SSL failure; a redirect that lands on a working
page is **not** gone; a redirect that collapses to a site root is counted
separately as `moved-root`; a 200 whose title says "not found" is a
`soft-404`, reported apart and never folded in silently. The sample was 100
stories a year at 100 points or more, eighteen years, 1,800 URLs, drawn with a
fixed seed.

## What happened

17.0 % for the 2014–2016 cohorts at 100 points or more — below the band. The
looser count, which folds in root redirects and pages that render "not found"
with a 200, takes the 2013 cohort to 36 %, and that does sit inside Pew's
figure. So the claim is true of one definition and false of the other, and
whoever repeats it almost never says which.

Two things worth keeping from the method: the fall is a step at 2015/16 rather
than a smooth decay, and 13 % of the links are blocked to this server even
when a headless browser asks. A crawl from a data centre reads some of that
blocking as death.

## The limit

Hacker News links are not the web. They skew technical, and technical
publishers keep their URLs better than most. One request from one server in
Italy on one evening: a timeout is a fact about that evening, not about the
page.