The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet

cheapskatesguide.org

The transitory nature of things in general is why I've been a big fan of archival since childhood, and why I've become a data hoarder. If there's anything particularly noteworthy or interesting, I try to save it. The amount of genuinely insightful, knowledgeable, or even just entertaining content in the world is staggering, and to me it's worth preserving. But you can't trust online storage because you never know when something like Google Photos will stop being an option.

If you've managed to successfully collect and organize all the noteworthy and interesting bits of info you've run into since childhood, the tools and techniques you used would make for a very interesting essay at least, book perhaps.

Thanks, that's quite a compliment. I sometimes think about writing a book/books about things I do. Unsurprisingly as an amateur self-archivist, I also document a lot about my life and my process so it would certainly be possible. What would make such an essay worth reading or a book worth buying, in distinction from the other self-help books already out there?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've never really seen anybody write about general long-term archival. Most books are along the lines of GTD focused on personal productivity, personal organization, or mangerial organization. I think your take on long-term archival of interesting things is somewhat unique in the self-help space and I've read a decent amount of self-help books.

The lifetime of Internet content is best described as nondeterminable. Some of it lives ... for a long time. Some of it vanishes quickly. Much of it persists until it doesn't, whether through the fluke of some small-scale calamity or a wide-ranging service shutdown. Or because the original author, or current hoster, simply feels it no longer warrants being online.

Personal blogs, and personal personal blogs, are particularly prone to this. I've been online long enough (going into my fourth decade) that I've seen many people who were at one time quite prolific and free-ranging online ... stop being so. Some died. Some had life catch up with them. Some merely tired of the attention. Some found their interests wandering elsewhere.

Archival has value, and I'm a fan of it.

But so do privacy, and peace and quiet.

I think the solution to this lies in peer-to-peer. Accessing content from other users directly from the IP addresses they have been assigned. The internet as used without paid hosting companies and advertising-supported intermediaries (free hosting on social media, or other forms of middlemen). Even IP addresses, i.e., accounts with ISPs, are often transitory over the course of a lifetime, so there is no "perfect" solution. Why store content exclusively with third parties. Store content offline on removable storage. Take it with you from computer to computer, ISP to ISP. Today, it is easier than ever, though maybe not "easy enough", to share content from home, peer-to-peer. That is, without using a hosting company, social media website, etc. The OP correctly identifies "popularity" as a problem. If you filter all your thinking about the internet through the lens of "popularity" (like Google and Facebook, and the thousands of "tech" wannabes) then you are dead in the water. That is how the "tech" people want you to think. The only content that is important in their world is popular content. Because they rely on advertising to support themselves, that is how they must think. You, the user, do not have to rely on advertising. You do not need to care about popularity. You do not have to be an unpaid content producer for "tech" companies.

I find the idea that a peer to peer network would be more efficient or capable of long time storage laughable.

More efficient or capable of long term storage than what.

I store stuff on removable media.

If you think that’s transitory, have you seen FaceBook? Twitter? If it’s not from like this week or newer, it’s effectively gone forever, impossible to find again.

Search- `from:handle term`

And there are other nice tricks.

Sure, and the Internet Archive has the Wayback Machine. But these are not commonly known and used tools, so for normal people, everything is a constant now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten.

I dare people to try to find article they saw on Reddit a week ago. It's pretty much impossible. The built-in search feature is worse than useless and even Google's index struggles unless you remember the title exactly, and even then it can be a crapshoot.

I can usually get pretty close even months later but some things escape. It can be frustrating to spend a long time trying to find an article you forgot about and then not finding it.

If I can remember part of the title, I always put that in quotes and if I see something I know it's not I use the term exclusion feature.

The Camas Reddit search has saved my bacon on numerous occasions.

it is easy. google indexes almost everything posted on reddit. use site:reddit.com

Google index works better than you think . YOu just have to remember the sub and a few keywords.

You can narrow google search by sub too

Reddit's search is more useful than is generally given credit for, though it's not spectacular.

Searching link submissions on Reddit is all but impossible, given that the search targets are typically just the link title itself. If you have a given URL and you want to see if there was any Reddit discussion, you'll have far better luck. (Use the "url:<urlspec>" syntax).

For self posts (that is, original content submitted to Reddit as text), the likelihood of a hit is far larger as there's much more text to search off of.

Even better: you can restrict search by the date-range presets, or if you don't mind submitting Unix timestamps, any arbitrary date specification in a signed 32-bit range. You can also restrict search by subreddit or submitter, among other criteria.

I've made ... reasonably good use of Reddit as an essay repository with the ability to recall any of somewhat over 500 items over the past decade or so, posted to a personal subreddit. It helps of course that I usually have some idea of the language I'd use, and/or repeat myself a lot.

There are limitations. Reddit doesn't index comments, and searching large subreddits or globally is now quite difficult due to the sheer volume of submissions. I wouldn't say Reddit's search is great, but used with intention, it's serviceable.

(The rest of the site is ... failing spectacularly to serve my needs, I'm not endorsing it at all. But search actually does provide utility.)

These days I find HN an even more useful personal pattern repository, thanks to Algolia and the "by:<username>" filter.

We are told that content posted on the Internet lasts forever. This is an oversimplification. While some content can last for decades, nothing is eternal, not even on the Internet. The whole truth is that content survives only as long as some person or organization is willing to pay to host it. Servers, electricity, and network bandwidth cost money.

Hosting ,electricity, and bandwidth are cheap. it is more likely someone will forget to renew the domain than not be able to afford it.

What survives is completely dependent upon the values, tastes, and perspectives of the parties hosting it. Much of what the Internet contains has an extremely short shelf-life when compared to the rest of history.

yeah that's cause the stuff you see is the stuff that survived. Most artifact are lost or destroyed.

For many of us, perhaps for most of us, much of what we post will be more or less hidden in obscurity until it finally disappears forever. And, very likely our most profound insights will have the briefest endurance in a society that seems to value only small ideas, easily digested

But the consequences of having your stuff be visible can be great and there is no guarantee it will vanish on its own in any reasonable time frame. Mirror repositories can index content long after it has been deleted by the original owner.

This person vastly underestimates how permanent the internet is.

I could understand a personal blog disappearing, but even major news websites aren't archived or mirrored except for bigger articles.

Sure, publish your personal data and it's on the internet forever, but publish a well thought out essay on identity over time and it's easily lost. Media is much, much worse.

As of the early 1970s, broadcast TV news networks routinely recycled video footage and had no in-house library or research services.

Addressed in Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere (1973).

https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst/page/n5/m...

Early entertainment programming was also often not saved. Some present archives exist soley because audience members "pirated" copies off the air.

Preservation of commercially-motivated product is often a very low priority. (Ironic given the US's Mickey Mouse copyright legislation.)

  > I don't know why she took down her blog. I hope
  > it was not because she decided to embrace the
  > drab adulthood she feared in her teens.

I think the author is projecting, and also baselessly attacking the simple, rich, meaningful lives so many people naturally grow into. At this stage in my life, I find more meaning in "doing" the dishes or knocking back a cold one with other dads at soccer practice, than I do writing a "meaningful" blog post as if I'm some big important nabob like NNT.

I'll read your blog. Point the way, please.

If you can forgive the fact that a blockchain is involved, arweave.org offers a credible solution to this.

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