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I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful f

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it rot.

GuiA 7y ago
Letting MySpace rot is fine. As the article points out, a more concerning issue is that “universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data”.
- griffinkelly 7y ago
  I just went on my Myspace account for the first time in probably 10 years. It was like going into a broken time capsule. Some pictures from a different age, others are gone. Such is life?
- return1 7y ago
  There will never be enough time to analyze that data anyways. Scientists are struggling to analyze their own data already. I think that is a known failure of contemporary science: too many small experiments that are often replicating each other.
oceanplexian 7y ago
I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) casually dismiss gay marriage. Powerful tech influencers like Mark Zuckerberg would love it if his IMs would disappear from the Internet. The examples go on and on.
- everdrive 7y ago
  I think if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that preserving the past does nothing to impede the changing moral zeitgeist. More records simply mean more people to attack for holding an opinion that has simply gone out of fashion. If the past decade wasn't characterized by tribalism and moral hysteria I'd be more inclined to worry about stringent preservation. At this point, I'm not really comfortable with what we're preserving.
  - 1000units 7y ago
    Embrace humanity. It's not that nice, but pretending otherwise only puts you at a disadvantage for understanding and dealing with the world. Our history is an inseparable part of who we are, and it should not be forgotten.
    - dev_dull 7y ago
      Time heals all wounds, except of course wounds preserved in digital formaldehyde.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It's simple. Don't say ignorant things on the internet, especially when it's tied into your real life identity. Lots of people struggle with this simple rule, because they have a compulsion to share their own myopic opinion (usually the same viral opinion as everyone else in their echo chamber) and contribute to the noise. If I was a public figure I wouldn't be on any social media platform at all, at best it wastes your already limited and highly valuable time. That being said, there's a lot of valuable information on the internet that is absolutely worth preserving. Scrape off the layer of social media and the internet is still a place of learning and problem solving. I do my own repairs on my car and the amount of times I've found a well written photo essay on a particular fix in a random honda forum, only to find the linked pictures broken, is astounding and a shame to say the least.
    - everdrive 7y ago
1000units 7y ago
I think that ship has sailed. All our most personal data is being archived forever competently by multiple parties.
- gdy 7y ago
  Good thing we are going to die and it won't matter. So let's think about what we can do for the generation that is about to be born.
  - 1000units 7y ago
    Can you think of an even remotely feasible solution? As long as we have the technology, I don't see this stopping.
    - gdy 7y ago
      Europe seems to be going in the right way with the GDPR, no?
dlkf 7y ago
You are potentially conflating two different issues. > Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. This is an excellent point, and I agree 100%. But it's not a priori obvious that we need to embrace internet rot to solve this problem. Perhaps we can work towards a future where privacy rights and digital literacy protect individuals from offense archaeology, and at the same time, work to preserve the knowledge, ideas, and sheer human weirdness that get posted every day (as long as the creators don't want it removed. My understanding is that the Internet Archive has explicitly stated that they are not interested in preserving stuff where there has been a takedown request.) One might argue that we have to make a choice. This is touched on in the article - redundancy presents a tradeoff between persistence benefits and security/privacy risks. But we should examine this tradeoff more closely and see if there isn't a healthy middle ground before we ask for one side wholesale.
asdff 7y ago
I encountered rot today when I was trying to repair a set of speakers. I found the guide on some audiophile forum, step by step with pictures for every removed screw and multiple angles. Only the pictures were originally hosted on photobucket and since retroactively removed. Some reddit users are egregious about it, installing scripts that overwrite their comments after x amount of time, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every edit on reddit can be found through archival tools. The solution is to take better care to not conflate your anonymous online persona to your real life persona—just don't post identifying information publicly online and you will be head and shoulders above many users on the internet in terms of privacy. There's no need to purge the internet of it's collective knowledge and history. We are very lucky to have the wayback machine preserving this stuff from dissapearing into the void, but it doesn't cache everything on the internet, especially if that forum I visited had shut down and became impossible to find in a search result. Side note: Is there an extension or bookmarklet available to automatically pull a web archive?
- aeternus 7y ago
  Rot may actually be useful by allowing out-dated, inaccurate, or useless information to be removed or fall into obscurity. Correct, useful, or noteworthy information is often re-posted and copied, leading to preservation.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It should still be at the discretion of the reader of what is correct and valid. In schools we are given the opportunity to learn how to critically think, vet sources, and how to seek out expert authorities on a matter (whether people practice these skills after their essay writing days are done is another can of worms). There is a lot of out of date material in libraries, for instance, but there is value in archives. Plus, who is going to copy a niche forum thread and repost it elsewhere? Most people just paste a link when they share information on the web, not clumsily copying and pasting full content. I bet whoever originally wrote that guide over a decade ago has no idea that it's rotted and useless. That information is gone unless someone knowledgeable spends their time crafting another guide, repeating the work that another already did a decade ago. There is value in archiving things beyond just relying on the small % of things that get actively reposted elsewhere. A good local caching solution of everything you've viewed on the web would be extremely useful for your personal reference, especially when sites frequently close and links die. If you really wanted to fantasize you could seed your cached site data using bittorrent to maintain a common web archive with everyone on the internet, free from a reliance of one lumbering archival corporate entity that might disappear on the whim of a VC or shareholder, free from commercial profiteering practices, free from the ad men and anyone else who's job it is to pollute and dilute technology for profit, and firmly in the hands of the users of the internet.

GuiA 7y ago

Letting MySpace rot is fine. As the article points out, a more concerning issue is that “universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data”.

griffinkelly 7y ago
I just went on my Myspace account for the first time in probably 10 years. It was like going into a broken time capsule. Some pictures from a different age, others are gone. Such is life?
return1 7y ago
There will never be enough time to analyze that data anyways. Scientists are struggling to analyze their own data already. I think that is a known failure of contemporary science: too many small experiments that are often replicating each other.

oceanplexian 7y ago

I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) casually dismiss gay marriage. Powerful tech influencers like Mark Zuckerberg would love it if his IMs would disappear from the Internet. The examples go on and on.

everdrive 7y ago
I think if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that preserving the past does nothing to impede the changing moral zeitgeist. More records simply mean more people to attack for holding an opinion that has simply gone out of fashion. If the past decade wasn't characterized by tribalism and moral hysteria I'd be more inclined to worry about stringent preservation. At this point, I'm not really comfortable with what we're preserving.
- 1000units 7y ago
  Embrace humanity. It's not that nice, but pretending otherwise only puts you at a disadvantage for understanding and dealing with the world. Our history is an inseparable part of who we are, and it should not be forgotten.
  - dev_dull 7y ago
    Time heals all wounds, except of course wounds preserved in digital formaldehyde.
- asdff 7y ago
  It's simple. Don't say ignorant things on the internet, especially when it's tied into your real life identity. Lots of people struggle with this simple rule, because they have a compulsion to share their own myopic opinion (usually the same viral opinion as everyone else in their echo chamber) and contribute to the noise. If I was a public figure I wouldn't be on any social media platform at all, at best it wastes your already limited and highly valuable time. That being said, there's a lot of valuable information on the internet that is absolutely worth preserving. Scrape off the layer of social media and the internet is still a place of learning and problem solving. I do my own repairs on my car and the amount of times I've found a well written photo essay on a particular fix in a random honda forum, only to find the linked pictures broken, is astounding and a shame to say the least.
  - everdrive 7y ago

1000units 7y ago

I think that ship has sailed. All our most personal data is being archived forever competently by multiple parties.

gdy 7y ago
Good thing we are going to die and it won't matter. So let's think about what we can do for the generation that is about to be born.
- 1000units 7y ago
  Can you think of an even remotely feasible solution? As long as we have the technology, I don't see this stopping.
  - gdy 7y ago
    Europe seems to be going in the right way with the GDPR, no?

dlkf 7y ago

You are potentially conflating two different issues. > Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. This is an excellent point, and I agree 100%. But it's not a priori obvious that we need to embrace internet rot to solve this problem. Perhaps we can work towards a future where privacy rights and digital literacy protect individuals from offense archaeology, and at the same time, work to preserve the knowledge, ideas, and sheer human weirdness that get posted every day (as long as the creators don't want it removed. My understanding is that the Internet Archive has explicitly stated that they are not interested in preserving stuff where there has been a takedown request.) One might argue that we have to make a choice. This is touched on in the article - redundancy presents a tradeoff between persistence benefits and security/privacy risks. But we should examine this tradeoff more closely and see if there isn't a healthy middle ground before we ask for one side wholesale.

asdff 7y ago

I encountered rot today when I was trying to repair a set of speakers. I found the guide on some audiophile forum, step by step with pictures for every removed screw and multiple angles. Only the pictures were originally hosted on photobucket and since retroactively removed. Some reddit users are egregious about it, installing scripts that overwrite their comments after x amount of time, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every edit on reddit can be found through archival tools. The solution is to take better care to not conflate your anonymous online persona to your real life persona—just don't post identifying information publicly online and you will be head and shoulders above many users on the internet in terms of privacy. There's no need to purge the internet of it's collective knowledge and history. We are very lucky to have the wayback machine preserving this stuff from dissapearing into the void, but it doesn't cache everything on the internet, especially if that forum I visited had shut down and became impossible to find in a search result. Side note: Is there an extension or bookmarklet available to automatically pull a web archive?

aeternus 7y ago
Rot may actually be useful by allowing out-dated, inaccurate, or useless information to be removed or fall into obscurity. Correct, useful, or noteworthy information is often re-posted and copied, leading to preservation.
- asdff 7y ago
  It should still be at the discretion of the reader of what is correct and valid. In schools we are given the opportunity to learn how to critically think, vet sources, and how to seek out expert authorities on a matter (whether people practice these skills after their essay writing days are done is another can of worms). There is a lot of out of date material in libraries, for instance, but there is value in archives. Plus, who is going to copy a niche forum thread and repost it elsewhere? Most people just paste a link when they share information on the web, not clumsily copying and pasting full content. I bet whoever originally wrote that guide over a decade ago has no idea that it's rotted and useless. That information is gone unless someone knowledgeable spends their time crafting another guide, repeating the work that another already did a decade ago. There is value in archiving things beyond just relying on the small % of things that get actively reposted elsewhere. A good local caching solution of everything you've viewed on the web would be extremely useful for your personal reference, especially when sites frequently close and links die. If you really wanted to fantasize you could seed your cached site data using bittorrent to maintain a common web archive with everyone on the internet, free from a reliance of one lumbering archival corporate entity that might disappear on the whim of a VC or shareholder, free from commercial profiteering practices, free from the ad men and anyone else who's job it is to pollute and dilute technology for profit, and firmly in the hands of the users of the internet.