5 ms·

People joke like "ha-ha, let it burn!" but it's the ordinary folks and their creations that anthropologists desire most. Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more

by mkr-hn 6y ago

People joke like "ha-ha, let it burn!" but it's the ordinary folks and their creations that anthropologists desire most. Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era. Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.

acwan93 6y ago
I wonder if in another 400 years some distant society will look at ours as the "Dark Ages" since all information is locked behind services that have since disappeared like Yahoo Answers, Geocities, AIM profiles, MySpace, and (maybe) Facebook.
- kristianc 6y ago
  Unlikely. Far more (printed) books are being published today than at any previous time in human history - certainly more so than in the Dark Ages where most had neither the equipment nor the education to write. And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera. https://ourworldindata.org/books https://ourworldindata.org/books
- Ekaros 6y ago
  I wonder how much of early web we have already lost. All of the forums, user generated content and so on just gone...
  - cogman10 6y ago
    Tons. There still exists some holdouts with long histories (such as anandtech). That said, once upon a time nearly all "social media" was forums for things of interest. It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
  - corywatilo 6y ago
    That's one positive of projects like Posthaven
- koolba 6y ago
  The real problem of the proletariat is not being able to permanently delete their comments.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    If social networks hadn't instituted real-name policies, people wouldn't be so concerned about old comments, because those comments might be linked to pseudonyms, not their real names.
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  I had only recently thought about this when YouTube announced they were hiding the video dislike count. Killing off Yahoo Answers is far worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258 Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era. This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics. What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately. We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it. You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.
- simias 6y ago
  They're both valuable. In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently. Or how some grammatical constructions shift for instance.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Romanes eunt domus.
    - dsr_ 6y ago
      ite domum, unless you're already in Rome, in which case sunt domum.
    - 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
      how is babby formed?
  - 6y ago
esturk 6y ago
I'm not sure that statement is true. Given just one OR the other, which would you pick? Graffiti, or random chatter/expression by extension, is useful as an addition to privileged writing which serves as a backbone to the events of history. Without the latter, the former isn't nearly as interesting. Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.
perardi 6y ago
If by “ordinary folks” you mean “spam bots”, then yes, our anthropologist weakly godlike artificial intelligences will appreciate this catalog.
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  Spam bots are one half of the decades-long battle between people looking for a quick buck and people trying to communicate. It's a huge part of the story of the last few decades of technology. It's right up there with the push and pull of progress of weapons and armor technology. How could that not be valuable?
Jakobeha 6y ago
Afaik that's what the internet archive is for. Hopefully they archive all of the content before it goes down.

by mkr-hn 6y ago

acwan93 6y ago

I wonder if in another 400 years some distant society will look at ours as the "Dark Ages" since all information is locked behind services that have since disappeared like Yahoo Answers, Geocities, AIM profiles, MySpace, and (maybe) Facebook.

kristianc 6y ago
Unlikely. Far more (printed) books are being published today than at any previous time in human history - certainly more so than in the Dark Ages where most had neither the equipment nor the education to write. And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera. https://ourworldindata.org/books https://ourworldindata.org/books
Ekaros 6y ago
I wonder how much of early web we have already lost. All of the forums, user generated content and so on just gone...
- cogman10 6y ago
  Tons. There still exists some holdouts with long histories (such as anandtech). That said, once upon a time nearly all "social media" was forums for things of interest. It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
- corywatilo 6y ago
  That's one positive of projects like Posthaven
koolba 6y ago
The real problem of the proletariat is not being able to permanently delete their comments.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  If social networks hadn't instituted real-name policies, people wouldn't be so concerned about old comments, because those comments might be linked to pseudonyms, not their real names.
nonbirithm 6y ago
I had only recently thought about this when YouTube announced they were hiding the video dislike count. Killing off Yahoo Answers is far worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258 Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era. This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics. What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately. We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it. You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.

simias 6y ago
They're both valuable. In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently. Or how some grammatical constructions shift for instance.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Romanes eunt domus.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    ite domum, unless you're already in Rome, in which case sunt domum.
  - 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
    how is babby formed?
- 6y ago

esturk 6y ago

I'm not sure that statement is true. Given just one OR the other, which would you pick? Graffiti, or random chatter/expression by extension, is useful as an addition to privileged writing which serves as a backbone to the events of history. Without the latter, the former isn't nearly as interesting. Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.

perardi 6y ago

If by “ordinary folks” you mean “spam bots”, then yes, our anthropologist weakly godlike artificial intelligences will appreciate this catalog.

mkr-hn 6y ago
Spam bots are one half of the decades-long battle between people looking for a quick buck and people trying to communicate. It's a huge part of the story of the last few decades of technology. It's right up there with the push and pull of progress of weapons and armor technology. How could that not be valuable?

Jakobeha 6y ago

Afaik that's what the internet archive is for. Hopefully they archive all of the content before it goes down.