Can you make "blood" sacrifices to the web gods?

[Melooon]

Many cultures believe in the idea of a blood sacrifice to a higher power; its a feature that appears in almost every society and usually is about the idea of giving up a small part of the essence of life to the unseen eternity so that life can be renewed again. 

The web on the other hand has no blood, you cannot sacrifice an eSheep to get good fortune and vitality for your website.. but can you??    Surly there must be an essence of life that the web has that could be sacrificed in shrines to gain the blessing of our beloved Sanrios and obscure 80s arcade machines.

I suppose deleting an artifact is a little like making a sacrifice, maybe even deleting an e-mail is a kind of sacrifice. The web is so bound up in the idea that things can be undone when we change our mind, but perhaps creating things that cannot be undone is a kind of blessing to the electric eternity.

What do you think? 

EDIT: A follow up question, should there be a ceremony when deleting things on the web?

[mortaki]

This actually reminds me of a site I found once. It's called doom.haus and it's a website that decays. The person who made it also made a blog post about why they made it.

At the time I wouldn't have said I thought it was a "blood sacrifice", but it definitely has that vibe. And I think things like dead links are a sort of blood sacrifice as well. There are sites that we can never see in their true form again. Only in screenshots and archives like a sort of digital ghost.

EDIT: Oh, and to answer your follow-up question: I think a kind of final rites would be cool for digital sacrifices. Like I've heard of people printing out pics of their exes, deleting the digital copies, and then burning the physical copies as a kind of catharsis. Is there a way to do that in a purely digital way? I dunno, maybe!

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Spilling digital blood that isn't drawn from veins wouldn't be a sacrifice, and I'm not sure about deleting mails either - you "sacrifice" them for making new space, true - but this is something else, just as vacuum cleaning your house hardly qualifies as sacrificing dust for the sake of hygiene. However, the main thing we pour into the internet is time, attention, and affection - and in a sense, this is as immediate "life force" as blood, and I think that this is done over the measure of what would be needed to pour information or "use it" for a certain purpose. One should chose well what internet deities they want to honor. 

[ValyceNegative]

I feel like sacrifices imply a connection with the otherworldly that don't fit with the Internet theme. No matter how cryptic you can make a web project, the Internet as a whole is deeply linked to humans that create and expand it.

Now, printers on the other hand... they work when they feel like it, come up with errors that make no sense, and each specimen of each models requires a different prayer for them to actually do their job.
I had a printer that wouldn't print if it detected a black ink cartridge. It just didn't want it. Black had to be made by combining the rest of the color cartridges. My husband's printer sometimes just disappears. It doesn't connect to any computer, phone or laptop no matter if wireless or with cable. Readjusts itself after 20 minutes. All we have to do to "fix" the problem is wait for them to finish whatever tantrum they have.
And paper jams? Obvious sacrificies. Paper is expensive, having it ruined between the printer rolls is definitely a waste of material, and it originally came from vegetal fibre, so it was once alive. A blood sacrifice through and through!

[vampiredazai]

When I think of sacrifice I think of something that has real significance to that person. Think of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son. I imagine the idea of sacrificing a sheep originated in farms so killing a precious, precious animal meant a real loss.
To sacrifice something online would require something comparable. What's the digital equivalent to a sheep? Also what would the internet Gods' want as payment? Hmmmmmmm, that's a tough one. Assuming that it has to be confined entirely online--no burning of consoles or PCs--maybe setting-up a one-time site to self-immolate with no backup or way to transfer data after a certain time frame. Whatever is there will be gone for good and will never appear again.
As for your second question, in Shintoism there's a practice of offering a prayer to an object before you throw it away. Because Shintoism argues that all objects contain a spirit, when something breaks that object has lived its complete life and you should thank it for its years of service.
I think the internet could use something like that. Before a gaming server goes down permanently, people log on and do all they can to keep it up for as long as possible. People get emotional when something important to them like a gaming space disappears. If you were to announce this forum was to terminate in a week, people here would get emotional and flood the site with memories before it went down for good.