6 ms·

More like hundreds of man-years, when you factor in all the editions, bootlegs etc that are now forever lost to time. This should be a golden age for informati

by dTal 8y ago

More like hundreds of man-years, when you factor in all the editions, bootlegs etc that are now forever lost to time. This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.

yipbub 8y ago
Could you give me an example?
- mcs_ 8y ago
  Not sure if it applies but... The entire Google plus.
- dTal 8y ago
  Sure. Mooi were formed in 1999, split in 2006, made a bunch of great music in between, and all that remains is this one song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
  - whatthewhatwhat 8y ago
    Wow, that was a really pretty song. Thanks for sharing it. Someday humanity will look back on this as a dark, barbaric age, thinking that ideas and sounds can be owned.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Mooi! Thank you for that link.
  - Simon_says 8y ago
    That's great song. Thanks for getting me interested in a band I can't torrent. Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
    - Raphmedia 8y ago
      "Formed in 1999, Mooi are duo Rachel Lloyd and Laura Dickinson. The pair write heartfelt and intimate songs, with both members playing guitars and singing." If you want more, look either of them up.
  - xhrpost 8y ago
    That's a shame. Looks like this one song managed to get on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Thsq5haec2ixuguqiep4bnfzcmi?t=Sway_-_Mooi https://play.google.com/music/m/Thsq5haec2ixuguqiep4bnfzcmi?...
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Did they ever release their music on CDs? If so, surely some of those CDs are still out there somewhere and could be ripped, if only they could be tracked down. I guess that just hasn't happened yet though.
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  what.cd. I only used it sparingly, but apparently they had a lot of rare releases that existed nowhere else. Vanished overnight with the feds taking it down.
  - layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
    Actually it was a reverse proxy that was taken down, and they didn’t even target what.cd, it was collateral damage. The admins got scared nevertheless and pulled the plug.
- MereInterest 8y ago
  As a non-music example (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowly made it onto BitTorrent and other sites, and are still available today. Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available. I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
  - yardie 8y ago
    I still have a 56kbps MP3 copy of Eminem’s first EP sent to me, pre-Napster, over AIM. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t unavailable until this post. And my son loves Eminem.
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      It looks like some copies hit the open internet around 2009, and a few of the songs has been remastered as promotional gimmicks. But yeah, I remember looking a bunch of years ago and finding that the title and one other song (Open Mic, maybe?) were the only things in circulation. It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
  - AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
    This is the negative of private invite-only trackers like what.cd. If they end up closing a lot of data gets dies with them. In contrast to that piratebay and nyaa.pantsu regularly upload their databases and there are even offline database readers for them.
lucasverra 8y ago
agreed : "too much information kills information"
derefr 8y ago
Given that those were torrent sites, they weren’t hosting the content. The individuals seeding the content still likely have copies of it. They just have no easy, obvious place to share it where they won’t get in trouble for doing so... for now. But if such a technology shows up later, the (already ripped and preserved) content might just show back up along with it.
- komali2 8y ago
  The /r/datahoarder subreddit is full of people like this. I'm happy they exist, if nothing else so at least there may be a digital record of our civilization if it's destroyed.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    "Data hoarding" along these lines is, IMO, an admirable use of time and money, and I wish that I had more of both so I could participate. One day I hope to.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Is there any technical reason we can't make a distributed tracker/community like what.cd, given that torrents are already distributed and ZeroNet et al exist? All we'd need is the forums and ratio bookkeeping.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  This is a good point; it's amazing what's still out there. Bitrot does set in over time, though, and the less distributed a work is the worse its odds of living through each new tech transition. I've known people who still have cassette recordings of concerts that are publicly considered "lost". Hopefully they digitize and back up, but not all of them will. Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.
vanderZwan 8y ago
> More like hundreds of man-years Yes, I just noticed I accidentally dropped the "of thousands" part while writing my comments.

by dTal 8y ago

yipbub 8y ago

Could you give me an example?

mcs_ 8y ago
Not sure if it applies but... The entire Google plus.
dTal 8y ago
Sure. Mooi were formed in 1999, split in 2006, made a bunch of great music in between, and all that remains is this one song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
- whatthewhatwhat 8y ago
  Wow, that was a really pretty song. Thanks for sharing it. Someday humanity will look back on this as a dark, barbaric age, thinking that ideas and sounds can be owned.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Mooi! Thank you for that link.
- Simon_says 8y ago
  That's great song. Thanks for getting me interested in a band I can't torrent. Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
  - Raphmedia 8y ago
    "Formed in 1999, Mooi are duo Rachel Lloyd and Laura Dickinson. The pair write heartfelt and intimate songs, with both members playing guitars and singing." If you want more, look either of them up.
- xhrpost 8y ago
  That's a shame. Looks like this one song managed to get on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Thsq5haec2ixuguqiep4bnfzcmi?t=Sway_-_Mooi https://play.google.com/music/m/Thsq5haec2ixuguqiep4bnfzcmi?...
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Did they ever release their music on CDs? If so, surely some of those CDs are still out there somewhere and could be ripped, if only they could be tracked down. I guess that just hasn't happened yet though.
Dirlewanger 8y ago
what.cd. I only used it sparingly, but apparently they had a lot of rare releases that existed nowhere else. Vanished overnight with the feds taking it down.
- layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
  Actually it was a reverse proxy that was taken down, and they didn’t even target what.cd, it was collateral damage. The admins got scared nevertheless and pulled the plug.
MereInterest 8y ago
As a non-music example (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.
Bartweiss 8y ago
What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowly made it onto BitTorrent and other sites, and are still available today. Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available. I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
- yardie 8y ago
  I still have a 56kbps MP3 copy of Eminem’s first EP sent to me, pre-Napster, over AIM. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t unavailable until this post. And my son loves Eminem.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    It looks like some copies hit the open internet around 2009, and a few of the songs has been remastered as promotional gimmicks. But yeah, I remember looking a bunch of years ago and finding that the title and one other song (Open Mic, maybe?) were the only things in circulation. It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  This is the negative of private invite-only trackers like what.cd. If they end up closing a lot of data gets dies with them. In contrast to that piratebay and nyaa.pantsu regularly upload their databases and there are even offline database readers for them.

lucasverra 8y ago

agreed : "too much information kills information"

derefr 8y ago

Given that those were torrent sites, they weren’t hosting the content. The individuals seeding the content still likely have copies of it. They just have no easy, obvious place to share it where they won’t get in trouble for doing so... for now. But if such a technology shows up later, the (already ripped and preserved) content might just show back up along with it.

komali2 8y ago
The /r/datahoarder subreddit is full of people like this. I'm happy they exist, if nothing else so at least there may be a digital record of our civilization if it's destroyed.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  "Data hoarding" along these lines is, IMO, an admirable use of time and money, and I wish that I had more of both so I could participate. One day I hope to.
StavrosK 8y ago
Is there any technical reason we can't make a distributed tracker/community like what.cd, given that torrents are already distributed and ZeroNet et al exist? All we'd need is the forums and ratio bookkeeping.
Bartweiss 8y ago
This is a good point; it's amazing what's still out there. Bitrot does set in over time, though, and the less distributed a work is the worse its odds of living through each new tech transition. I've known people who still have cassette recordings of concerts that are publicly considered "lost". Hopefully they digitize and back up, but not all of them will. Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> More like hundreds of man-years Yes, I just noticed I accidentally dropped the "of thousands" part while writing my comments.