The Internet Is Forgetting. Your Business Doesn't Have To
Pew Research actually counted: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are gone. Not archived somewhere. Gone. And that count is from before AI started eating the web in earnest. The argument keeps resurfacing on Hacker News: AI answers replace visits, sites lose traffic and money, sites shut down, and the internet's collective memory quietly disappears. The Internet Archive catches some of it. It can't catch everything.
That sounds like a problem for historians. It's also a problem for anyone running a business.
Your business memory lives on rented land
Most small businesses keep their memory on other people's platforms. Customer conversations live in Instagram DMs and KakaoTalk chats. Orders live in a spreadsheet someone emailed around two years ago. Reviews live on a platform that can change its rules whenever it wants. If any one of those services pivots, gets acquired, or dies, that history goes the same way the 2013 web went. You don't just lose a tool. You lose the record of who your customers are and what they bought.
The fix has been obvious for decades: own your system of record. Your own app, your own database. Nobody did it because it cost a developer's salary and six months. That's the part that changed.
What owning your record actually looks like
On DontCode, every project ships with its own database and private file storage. You don't set them up. They're just there when your app deploys.
My favorite example is one of our simplest recipes, the weekly admin report. Every Monday at 9 AM, a scheduled job emails you last week's numbers: signups, active users, revenue. Then it archives a copy to your private storage bucket. Run that for a year and you have 52 dated snapshots of your business that no algorithm change, acquisition, or shutdown can touch.
The app itself keeps memory too. Every significant change creates a version snapshot, so if something breaks you roll back to a known-good state in one click. Your business record and your product both have history, and both belong to you.
The actual shift
None of this requires writing code. That's what's new. Owning your data used to mean hiring engineers, and renting convenience meant giving up the record. For the first time you can have both: the convenience of no-code and the ownership of custom software.
The web forgetting itself is above my pay grade. Your business forgetting itself is optional. If you want to see what owning your own record feels like, poke around DontCode. The database comes with it.