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Comment by FroshKiller | Hacker News Reader

Then it isn't around. It's walled off. And it will disappear.

It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.

"Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy".

I prefer open web for sentimental reasons, but I don't think it's naturally better at preserving the information than walled gardens.

> It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.

Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire.

> "Internet never forgets"

This has alwasy been in the context of things you want the internet to forget and it still holds true.

> "information wants to be free"

And it does - once something leaks it is hard to put it back into the bag.

> "censorship on the internet is impossible"

I don't recall this claim but depending on how you look at things isn't really wrong: Is there any kind of information that you can't find on the internet because someone wants to hide it? Yes, some parts of the web are censored but remember the internet is not just the web and even on the web highly controversial websites can cling to life.

> "easy access to information helps democracy"

It does. Most people do not have easy access to information, at best they have a highly curated selection that the media wants them to see. They could avail themselves to the full picture but are conditioned not to.

Misinformation wants to be free just as much as information. Removing information is the wrong strategy, because internet makes publishing information so much easier. And bitrot+time will effectively remove the information for you if you just make people look elsewhere for long enough.

So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.

Lying is even easier if you can deny people access to the truth.

You can't lie to people you can't communicate with.

Do you spend your life reading 20yo blog posts? Just live the moment with the opportunities it gives you

Sometimes. I stumbled across somebody’s 20+-year-old collection of deep musical analyses of early Chicago songs. That same material on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/whatever is going to be inaccessible.

I'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I don't much care for it when I don't have anything else occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some nuance and complexity that makes them worth another listen.

I believe this is the one I found:

https://www.paulmorellimusic.com/notes-on-chicago-transit-au...

Thank you!

I think the point is that passively feeding your content to a profit engine actually limits your opportunities vs a modicum of agency over how you want to share your knowledge and experiences. If you honestly don't care about anything beyond your tiktok feed, that's fine, but there is interest out there in a longer time envelope of cultural production.

A forum for my car just went dark. Gone are not quite 20 years of posts and discussions that I've searched many times over while troubleshooting mine or in preparation for some job that needed to be done.

I made this discovery after going to post a novel solution for getting into the hood with a seized hood release in hopes that it might spare someone else some trouble in the future.

All things are not in the moment. Sometimes it's good to learn from the past.

It makes me wish for forums where posts and comments are automatically synced and cached locally. Then everyone has a copy in case it closes down, and someone could use the content to bootstrap a replacement.

Note, that isn't the same as an ambitious fully federated mesh network or anything, but being limited in certain ways makes it efficient and easier in others.

The current moment is great if you never need to find an old book, fix an old car, fix an old house, identify an old variety of plant, or any of a thousand other things. Basically, if you have no other interests, responsibilities, or desires other than fads, like a child. That's fine. Otherwise, there are decades of useful experience of large groups of human out there to be mined. It can often save you thousands of dollars, but then again, that's something only a grown-up cares about.

Funnily, the walled garden often gives people the impression that it is not walled but in fact infinite. I‘m always shocked at how many people don‘t realize how little information is accessible on the internet anymore. Yes, as soon as you need something that isn‘t faddish/of the immediate current moment (especially if you‘re not trying to buy something), the internet fails. There is so much useful info that is extremely difficult to find online these days.

> I‘m always shocked at how many people don‘t realize how little information is accessible on the internet anymore.

Any millennial or nerdy Xer with a good memory would tell you what the deal is. We were the first ones who came of age online, and saw what the Internet was like when it came to prominence. Now, our libraries, town halls, and weird gardens are all ash. Try to surf like you did in 2010 and all you'll see is spam; the filters work in reverse now. Log in to what "social media" is these days (after filling in your phone number and uploading your driver's license) and it's just cable TV with some extra widgets.

At least Wikipedia is still there.

No, that information is still on the internet. It's just Google/Bing/etc. who fail to find it.

Ironic you post this because I just rediscovered a 20yo blog post that I remembered reading, re-read it again and found it very motivating and inspiring and submitted it.

Yes, I do read a lot of 20 year old content on the internet.

I’m somewhere in the middle on this. These communities are real, and the value of the content shared by users is real.

On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with.

To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longevity of the content. Most of the old web disappeared too.

I think that in order to have any hope of returning to something more open and public on a wider scale, it’s necessary to understand why these communities are thriving on discord. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I suspect that the wall is actually a benefit to some.

> are thriving on discord

This is always multiply determined, but part of the answer is that Discord and these other walled gardens are subsidized by VC funding with the expectation that at some point they'll turn on the garbage compactor and squeeze out the juicy value.

As sibling comment got at - the wall is a benefit because it's how they can justify raking in large investments to burn through while loss-leading for up to a decade (or two! just look at Google) before turning the screws on the user. If they just turned the screws without a wall their users would flee and they'd go under. With a wall, their users are stuck in by network effects, FOMO, etc.

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