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Comment by jerezzprime | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about the widely held opinion that it is paramount that all web content persist for infinity. That seems parallel to someone expecting my personal handwritten journal to be archived and available to all of future humanity. I'm not convinced that is a positive thing, nor is it a necessary thing. How egotistical do you need to be to think that your personal blog is worth persisting forever?

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TFA is written from a reader's perspective: the author had found a bunch of links important enough to bookmark, and then most of them disappeared.

It's partially that for most other media once you have found and cataloged a piece of media/data it's safe. Books don't disappear off my shelves. Even things you haven't gotten specific copies of generally don't disappear entirely, they may get harder but there's usually a copy /somewhere/. Things on the internet tend to disappear entirely unless they've been included in the few archiving things like archive.org.

I wish I had every single personal journal/notebook whatever of every human who ever existed (copyright protections granted). Dont you? Socrate's, the diary of simple seaman in Columbus 4th voyage, the diary of a lesbian peasant in 15th China, can you imagine that? How better would be our understanding of the past and how many jewels would be preserved. Sure, lots of junk, but as the saying goes: One Mans Junk is Another Mans Treasure

The things I’d put in a personal journal are certainly not what I put online.

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