I prefer to think about information in terms of entropy and complexity. For example, you have some atoms floating in space. These atoms contain certain bits of information—their numbers of protons and neutrons, the spins of their electrons. They are ordered systems which convey discreet signals based on the complexity of those systems. Each nucleus of an atom, each quark in that nucleus, contains discreet bits of information. More importantly, every part of this system—every electron, each electron’s spin and charge—interacts with every other part and it can even interact with stuff outside the system.
Now if all these atoms get sucked into a black hole, that information seems to disappear. All that complexity and all the information it conveys is absorbed into singular properties of the black hole. Black holes don’t have discreet atoms, nuclei, electrons, each with their own spins and charges and whatnot. The entire black hole acts like a single particle; the whole thing has just one mass, spin, and charge, and this is the only information we can glean from a black hole.*
*Hawking radiation implies that the information doesn’t actually vanish into a black hole.