Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

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> Not all information needs to be preserved for all time.

I disagree, and strongly. Future historians will probably disagree with you too. Even the most inane TV shows can prove to be extremely valuable when trying to decipher the culture of various countries 300 or 3000 years in the past. Imagine reading a trashy romance novel from 1000 BC. You'd learn a lot about the people who lived in that time.

You might counter this by saying that with all the information out there now, we only need to keep the "good stuff". But who decides what's good, right now? How do you know that what you decide is good will always be seen as good? Your personal opinions on the content disappearing are totally irrelevant when perhaps millions of people have seen it or have been affected by it.

All information that is created should be saved, especially since we're able to. Imagine the ancient Romans deciding to burn a bunch of books because it cost too much to hire guards for the library. Ouch.

I agree with you, but practically, not all information can be kept.

There are teams of people right now deciding what is 'good' (i.e. what is kept) and what is shredded. They're called archivists, and, using their judgement in conjunction with government-created records retention schedules, they're culling both government and private records. This culled information is removed for a variety of reasons, space being one of the most prominent. By such means is the pool of available primary sources that will form the basis for future histories created by underpaid and underfunded but well-meaning bureaucrats.

Sounds like the same situation obtains not only in the dead-tree archives but also in the digital ones. Sigh. I wish people would prioritize our cultural legacy first instead of last when it comes to funding.

In your analogy, instead of burning the books they could just dump them in big trash heaps in Egypt, or in jars in Palestine, which correspond to bittorrenting quite nicely.

Mind, I don't think future historians will weep too much about losing some promotional websites for such actual content.

Is the downvote above because someone disagrees, or because the downvoter is just completely unaware of the nature of the sites being taken down?

Most of these sites are promo fluff for BBC TV shows. Some are cancelled, some are for news show with little more "content" than "This show next comes on --- on BBC -".

Most of these sites would be dismissed as "marketing" if the BBC were a for-profit company. Marketing for defunct products. The rest is material that's being legitimately archived elsewhere.

(OT: I didn't downvote you above; in fact, I can't, since you replied to my comment I think. However, note that many of us frequently accidentally downvote instead of upvote and can't undo it, especially on mobile touch-browsers if we're not zoomed-in enough for a big arrow)

I've occasionally done that myself, but I then post a note that I meant to upvote.

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