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I think the parent does make a good point that it is getting harder to keep your hands on your own ephemera, especially in usable/meaningful forms (i.e. I'd say

I think the parent does make a good point that it is getting harder to keep your hands on your own ephemera, especially in usable/meaningful forms (i.e. I'd say a GDPR dump of context-free comments isn't that meaningful). The example that comes to mind personally is chat logs: I have a fairly complete record of IRC conversations. It's not like I read them daily, but it is often nice to be able to refer back to, especially if I'm shooting the shit with friends or something and we can't remember who was actually the best at AoEII LAN. These logs were produced by my client(s) by default. That same friend group later migrated to Skype. I have no Skype logs at all, and there's a several-year gap in chat history before we ended up back on IRC. Could I have come up with some kind of logging solution? Probably, but I didn't, and now I'm sad about that and wish that the Skype client had been more aligned with my interests as a user, but I guess that's what I get for using proprietary software in the first place. So yes, sure, you can technically screenshot everything if you try hard enough, but the location/accessibility of digital ephemera has definitely moved away from end-users, toward corporations, as centralization advanced and clients regressed from user-agents to informers.

jonas21 6y ago
People have been chatting with other people in real life for millennia with no logs or records. Being able to save chat logs is a bit of a quirk of the online world, isn't it?
- tomaszs 6y ago
  I'd argue that having a memory of the past was and is one of the things people always aimed to have. It is part of being a human being. Even thousands of years ago people saved their stories on cave walls.
- livueta 6y ago
  Well sure, but that's true for plenty other quirks of modernity: the fact that we got along without them for millennia doesn't necessarily say anything about their present usefulness. Chat logs are just an example, and maybe not a very good one because of the pre-digital analogue you point out: let's try screenshots of gameplay. I used to use a third-party tool to take screenshots/clips and upload them to a server. I still have all the clips and pics from these. These days, that functionality is often part of whatever game service framework you're operating in. A while ago a friend's account got banned, and that wiped out all the screenshots and clips stored by the service. Centralization and moves away from open protocols makes it easier for that type of situation, where you don't actually own a copy of content you're creating, to come about.

jonas21 6y ago

People have been chatting with other people in real life for millennia with no logs or records. Being able to save chat logs is a bit of a quirk of the online world, isn't it?

tomaszs 6y ago
I'd argue that having a memory of the past was and is one of the things people always aimed to have. It is part of being a human being. Even thousands of years ago people saved their stories on cave walls.
livueta 6y ago
Well sure, but that's true for plenty other quirks of modernity: the fact that we got along without them for millennia doesn't necessarily say anything about their present usefulness. Chat logs are just an example, and maybe not a very good one because of the pre-digital analogue you point out: let's try screenshots of gameplay. I used to use a third-party tool to take screenshots/clips and upload them to a server. I still have all the clips and pics from these. These days, that functionality is often part of whatever game service framework you're operating in. A while ago a friend's account got banned, and that wiped out all the screenshots and clips stored by the service. Centralization and moves away from open protocols makes it easier for that type of situation, where you don't actually own a copy of content you're creating, to come about.