Hacker News Reader

Comment by someguy7250 | Hacker News Reader

Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far.

Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them.

Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups and make sure they will be lost when we die.

*Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book burning.*

Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of Copyright protections

View on HN

Nah, people just need to wake up and start building own infra. Everyone just waits for some white knight to pour money at infra to backup stuff for them. No, DO sth usefull. In good old days people used to have small web servers to host personal and friends webpages.

Yeah, it could not scale and your site could be DoSed, but thats another problem with todays internet, noone gives a fuck up about abuse..

Anyway, layer your virtual Internet.. All the toys are here. VPNs (wireguard, OpenVPN, tinc-vpn, ...), Routing (Quagga, FRR, bird). Build infra, have fun.

Neat project is DN42, but they are more for testing and research. We need more such networks for content, gaming and other interesting stuff.

This seems oxymoronic. There shouldn't be backlash against deletionism because deletionism will cease once there's enough backlash against it.

Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s

I don't understand your point.

My point is book burning can cause backlash. Therefore so can deletionism.

When the backlash happens, it's often already too late. But people are aware something was gone, that's why there is a backlash.

I know this because it happened in the past with the Cultural Revolution. Not saying it will happen in the same way here.

Maybe the only backlash we'll ever get is against my stupid comments. Lol.

"We should delete data so that people get upset" is just shy of "we should shoot some kids so people will finally get upset". If we're going for over the top statements anyway.

When we look at the actual current US sociopolitical climate, we see that people don't actually care about either of those things. Quite the opposite, they are more than happy to burn books.

So what we can expect instead is that they'll care even less about a bunch of folks hitting the delete keys that wipe out several generations worth of historical record because it happens to be digital. If anything, they'll cheer about it.

> "We should delete data so that people get upset" is just shy of "we should shoot some kids so people will finally get upset".

Excuse me? Since when is shooting kids _just shy of_ deleting data. And no the rest of your comment doesn't pull that argument together.

It's just shy of it by the part where people rather than important information die; the structure of the argument is exactly the same. "We should do the thing we want to not have happen so much and to such a severe degree that people will finally get upset enough to want to stop us, but we better do it *a lot* because we know they won't care otherwise" is a truly idiotic argument to make when the thing you're doing can't be undone, and your goal is to not have it happen at all.

Whether it's information deletion or human deletion, you can't undo the damage you're doing, so what the hell are you talking about when you pretend it's something to consider?

> Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far.

That seems wildly optimistic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com