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> and it's worth saving. That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just p

> and it's worth saving. That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all. I never was part of Usenet, but I understand a lot of people were angry at Dejanews and Google when what was once (perhaps naively) viewed as ephemeral communication was turned into a public searchable archive. At least most people on Kuro5hin used pseudonyms.

jsmthrowaway 10y ago
> That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all. That isn't your call, and is nobody's call, really. Better to preserve it all and let people decide for themselves when they look at it.
Kadin 10y ago
I was a user of K5 and I don't think anyone there viewed it as "ephemeral communication". If they thought so, it seems as though the joke's sort of on them, given that the site stayed operational for almost 17 years. I can forgive that sort of attitude among the early users of Usenet, because there was a long period during which it was just technically infeasible to have a permanent archive of everything (and it's still kinda true, if you count binaries groups; most Usenet providers don't keep everything forever). But that was definitely not the case by the time K5 came around. The site's culture, at least IMO, was that if you really embarrassed yourself your way out was by ditching your pseudonym and starting over (or by saying the dumb thing under a throwaway account to begin with, which was perhaps too easy on K5). There's perhaps some argument to be made that forums that require real-name registration ought to allow comments to either be deleted (bad) or anonymized (probably better) on request, to allow people to move away from past statements. But I don't know if that's ever really been a reasonable expectation on a pseudonymous forum, at least of the non-toy/non-amateur variety.

jsmthrowaway 10y ago

> That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all. That isn't your call, and is nobody's call, really. Better to preserve it all and let people decide for themselves when they look at it.

Kadin 10y ago

I was a user of K5 and I don't think anyone there viewed it as "ephemeral communication". If they thought so, it seems as though the joke's sort of on them, given that the site stayed operational for almost 17 years. I can forgive that sort of attitude among the early users of Usenet, because there was a long period during which it was just technically infeasible to have a permanent archive of everything (and it's still kinda true, if you count binaries groups; most Usenet providers don't keep everything forever). But that was definitely not the case by the time K5 came around. The site's culture, at least IMO, was that if you really embarrassed yourself your way out was by ditching your pseudonym and starting over (or by saying the dumb thing under a throwaway account to begin with, which was perhaps too easy on K5). There's perhaps some argument to be made that forums that require real-name registration ought to allow comments to either be deleted (bad) or anonymized (probably better) on request, to allow people to move away from past statements. But I don't know if that's ever really been a reasonable expectation on a pseudonymous forum, at least of the non-toy/non-amateur variety.