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> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with? That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still most

> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with? That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.

efwerf333 9y ago
Of course on HN I get a bunch of "But if you do it with this method relevant to 2017 tech and economics..." answers. No one seems to catch the point of whether or not we should as a species, care about great-great-granddads cat posts on Facebook? "But maybe in the future they'll be useful!" My background is in math and information theory, not programming and fetishizing turning every idea I have into a technical implementation. 1) I don't see giving the future a legacy technical infra to deal with because relative to them, cave men from 2017 thought it would be "awesome." 2) I highly doubt there's going to be useful information that isn't already abstracted into news services (which keep records), academic works, etc. that can be culled from storing everyone's Facebook and Instagrams. Why bother going to the beach? Oggle great-grandma's Instagram from 2019! Like I said, religious endeavor to "live forever" by conceptualizing a way to "cheat death" is what this smells like. None of those people will have cheated death, and future humans would be under no obligation to keep it online. So why bother?