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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it.

I feel you got the comment backwards: a better analogy would be "if a used-books store full of Dan Browns were to burn down, would we regret the loss of maybe one chapter that has some value?"

Your position seems to be "yes", but I wouldn't dismiss so easily the opposite view: that 90% of everything is crap, and that keeping everything forever "just in case" sounds surprisingly similar to hoarding.

I do not oppose "purposeful archiving" - as someone mentioned, saving outgoing Wikipedia links seems smart. But my old twitter account, where I kept track of missed trains? There are better sources for that, and no one missed it when it was gone.

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It's almost impossible to evaluate what is of lasting value in the moment, while it is readily available.

Imagine an author writes a paperback. It isn't very good, but a few people read it. Later, one of those people goes on to rework some of those ideas into their own script for a film. The film is a success. Years later, the scriptwriter mentions the paperback as an inspiration while giving an interview, but it's long out of print.

To a biographer or a devoted fan of the film, this forgotten book, while of little value in and of itself has become a valuable part of a larger story. If it were culled when the contents of that used book store burned down, we would have lost something without realizing it. And that's how we lose most things. The only way to minimize this is to store as much as we can, in the hopes that we may find a use someday, and thankfully digital storage has made this very, very cheap. The opportunity cost is tiny, and the potential reward, given enough time, is unbounded.

But the opportunity cost is not tiny. This is literally a twitter thread asking for financial support.

And I do recognize that the thousands of petabytes will likely be chump change to store in a decade... but necessarily the economies of storage will keep pace with the rate of content production. It will always be expensive to store everything.

The question is, do we gain back this investment from future uses of these archives? I dunno. I’d be interested to hear what value archivists have gotten out of the archives, given it is decently old already.

Like with other "90% of X is wasted" sayings, you don't know which 90% it is.

Even if you look at classical art with an honest eye, you can find plenty of works that in themselves are, well, crap - but they're being preserved and reproduced and talked about, because they acquired meaning over time. They've become relevant in context.

Take your old Twitter account. It's probably not interesting. It probably won't ever be. But it might. Imagine several decades from now, your great-granddaughter becomes a well-known, influential politician. This might retroactively and posthumously make you relevant, and in the process your Twitter account. Biographists might find it useful. Or independently, people who're into historical train schedules. Etc.

It's near-impossible to predict what the future will find relevant, so if storing some memories is nearly free on the margin - as it is today, with digital technologies - then just storing it is a no-brainer.

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