Comment by mantrax5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mantrax5 | Hacker News Reader

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"If the destruction of all this unique user-generated content pisses you off -- and it should"

I'm not sure why it should. When did we get this strange idea that when you make some piece of content, no matter if it's quality or not, it deserves to pollute the cyberspace forever.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but one of the reasons nature "works" is that everything old is allowed to dissolve and become the base ground for the new that will come after it.

People naturally copy content that they find interesting. And content which isn't that interesting naturally gets lost. Maybe that lost content stuck around enough to inspire someone to do something in that spirit later or (which also counts), but it doesn't survive itself.

Imagine if everyone gets Glasses one day and starts doing non-stop 1080p video stream of their lives. Are we going to be "pissed off" at that being deleted too?

If you do the stats you'll notice that over 99.99% of the content in archive.org is never accessed. Nobody cares.

And that's how it should be. We should really allow content to die. I have the firm belief that information doesn't just "want" to be free. It also wants to be allowed to die gracefully at some point.

Who's to say what we'll find important down the line? Quite often what seems mundane and not worth the effort to copy or maintain turns out, in hindsight, to have true value. One of if not the most important insights in studying previous cultures comes from going through their trash heaps. Similarly, while they could seem pointless, a lot of this content could provide unique insight on our own culture down the line that 'valuable' pieces saved and curated can't.

See, for example, some of the BBC shows that got deleted because magnetic tape was too valuable to just store popular culture on.

Recently the BBC has been asking people to search attics and sheds for home recordings (taped from tv or radio broadcast) or "lost" tape (probably meant for erasure and reuse that got ahem 'lost' on the way and ended up in a BBC technician's collection).

I find it weird that mega had petabytes of poorly de-duped content (very many copies of the same pirated movie in different rips) yet we're talking about deleting content because, well, because.

Having said that I'm not giving them any money to keep it archived let alone online so perhaps I need to shut up or put up.

People sometimes make copies of things they find interesting, but those copies are rarely accessible to the public. It can be pretty hard to get your hands on something after it disappears from the web. For example, forums.truecrypt.org went down three days ago, it's of interest to some people, and you're going to have a hell of a time finding some guy who happened to launch HTTrack on it before it went down.

Valid points, but you need some strategy for pruning the archive.

We can't just keep everything forever. First it was text files, then html files, then html files with images, and now videos.

Without pruning, the task of archive.org will become impossible, so the question of what's important and what isn't will have to be decided at some point.

I'm currently running through a Peter Norton assembly tutorial from the 1980s. It's already helped me understand the code better than I have before. Should that content have died, just because it's old?

If you'd re-read my post, you'd notice my focus is on the content's quality, and not its age. Age serves as a useful threshold to review if something should stay or not, but it's not the sole criteria.

Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.

Despite I expressed myself very clearly, I expected two types of reactions: knee-jerk reactions like yours, which argue against something I didn't say; and getting down-modded, because the currently accepted wisdom of HackerNews is that we should hoard any type of information regardless of its merit.

Even though it's explicitly against the rules to down-mod to disagree with someone's opinion, every scoring system gets abused this way eventually. I find this sad.

>you'd notice my focus is on the content's quality,

But then you redefined it as 'popular' and 'interesting' content. While something that is popular and holds the interest of people might also be quality content the reverse is not necessarily true. How many quality on maths or chemistry or history or engineering or some remote tribal language or what have you are popular? (Lets assume some arbitrary popularity metric like a million views) Sure you might be able to popularize the 1-2 minute nugget of incomplete/dumbed-down information but I don't consider that quality. And I'm quite sure that you won't be able to actually do anything by knowing some random formula/effect/trivia without the multi-hour lectures associated with their fundamentals.

>Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.

I disagree. We've lost countless important historical documents because they were neglected/destroyed/etc. What you're defining as the natural order is just the 'winners' re-writing history. Its already easy to alter history by altering Wikipedia or buying a news publication and making certain articles un-crawlable. What if Google deleted the cache or Wikipedia did not keep a history of changes? "If you can't Google it, it doesn't exist" is pretty much how the future might unfold. I think its important to preserve even unimportant things.

You might have a point or two in what you're trying to say, but you should really consider the broader argument. Oh and I did upvote you. :)

There's value in preserving the mundane. If we only preserve things which are noteworthy, the cultural artifacts, the special occasions, the celebrations and wedding dresses, it's easy to lose track of the fact that it's worth remembering what everyday life was like, too.

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