Saving social media for posterity | Hacker News Reader

Saving social media for posterity

nytimes.com

44 pointsmattdennewitz14 comments

No mention of ArchiveTeam, which has been slurping down social media into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for years now. I sicced the crawlers on some of the yuckier corners of Twitter just the other day. The bad needs to be preserved along with the good, for context.

(Join us! http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveBot)

The gratuitous bit of quantum at the end was irritating. I'd have much preferred it if they said something like "Unrelatedly, a recent quantum physics paper used a phrase which is particularly apt in this context:".

Even the New York Times now has clickbait. Sad.

Back in the day, they were just called catchy headlines.

Back in the day, they were called tabloid headlines.

A "catchy headline" used to mean something with clever alliteration. I doubt the editors from even ten years ago would have allowed something like this one.

Ok, we changed the title to a representative phrase from the article.

Change that final period to an exclamation point and you have a reasonably convincing Donald Trump tweet.

HM automatically deletes exclamation points from titles. Was curious (and because it's a lazy Saturday) and found that the title-sanitizer also deletes exclamation points from anywhere in the text (not just the end). I guess that makes submitting a code snippet with `!` a bit tricky.

I guess you can't mention Yahoo! either

Every time I see Yahoo! written with the suffixed "!" I think of every El Reg headline regarding them.

Here's a recent example:

"Yahoo! is! not! killing! Messenger! today!, just! the! desktop! client!" - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/05/yahoo_messenger_is_n...

And here's one from over 14 years ago!

"Yahoo! Rips! Up! Privacy! Policy!" - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/04/03/yahoo_rips_up_privac...

To be fair, "change history" in this case refers to transformations in the work of historians.

Now? It's been chockablock full of it for at least a half decade. I loved the crossword, but it got so that was the only part worth reading out of the whole paper.

Is it just me or is the scope of what's considered "clickbait" expanding exponentially?

I don't see how this is clickbait. How and to what degree we record human communication has a direct impact on what's remembered as history. The headline isn't exaggerating.

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