3 ms·

How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would

How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would mean ignoring the huge volume of newer stuff? A hundred years? Two hundred? I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? In fact, I'm incredibly greatful that I grew up before all the random shit that I threw out there as part of my youth was subjected to obsessive cataloging and archival efforts.

codingdave 5y ago
If you grew up before the internet, surely you remember all the DIY manuals that lived in everyone's home. Everyone had that same big hardbound book of how to do basic home repairs. Many people had sewing books, electrical books, Chilton manuals for their cars. Cookbooks, too. We have valued how-to information for decades, and that interest and need far pre-dates the internet. So while I get what you are saying that much of the pop culture videos do not hold long-term value (which is also questionable considering how many of us older folk still have collections of vinyl)... there absolutely is valuable content out there that deserves preservation.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  There will probably always be niche sources for specific "how to" information. YouTube is currently a low-effort way to make that generally available in video format, but it's certainly not the only viable solution, and the information you can get from a specific enthusiast site or forum is often better and more detailed.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives to check out those old how-to books, they're using contemporary sources on Youtube instead. And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in fifty years. I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my generation. It might temporarily have a lot of monetary value near my death - when other copies have already been lost - but to someone born fifty years after me? What use would pulp fiction from the 80s be to many of them? My parents and uncles are in a bit of disbelief of how little even I care about the Beatles already, after all.
  - BatFastard 5y ago
    Well not caring for the Beatle is like not caring for Mozart. Bad taste is always an option in a free society.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      Even people who care about Mozart's music largely have no idea how much other stuff from the time period they might have enjoyed that was lost, and that hypothetical loss is not ruining their life at all. We don't live dramatically longer or have dramatically larger memories than our ancestors, so things necessarily have to get lost and replaced by the new things that have been created since then.
mdoms 5y ago
You don't know what's important until much later. That's what makes archiving difficult. Also, important to whom?
krapp 5y ago
>I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? You might have a better understanding of the culture that produced them. You might appreciate a work of art that would otherwise not exist. We have graffiti from Pompeii, we know Ea-nasir sold cheap copper in ancient Ur 3700-odd years ago, but we've lost countless works of literature, music and film, some by the greatest masters of their age. What artifacts of culture survive the scouring sands of time is often a matter of happenstance, rather than quality. Chances are almost everything our species has produced culturally, scientifically and artistically - the whole corpus of our knowledge output over the last century - is going to vanish within a generation or two anyway, simply because the digital foundation into which we've transferred so much of it is brittle and ephemeral. If we want to leave anything behind for future generations at all besides climate change, pollution and nuclear waste, we should save as much as possible rather than only what we consider to be relevant.
- Forbo 5y ago
  Minor nitpick, it was ~1750 BC, so that would be around 3700 years ago.
  - krapp 5y ago
    Oops, fair enough.
deeblering4 5y ago
These subjective questions are pointless to try and answer. The idea is that a future person could freely deep dive through a rich well indexed history of media about whatever specifically interests them I wish people would stop trying to assess the value of a given piece of media and just tag and archive the stuff. For instance, high quality footage of live music from 100 years ago would be very interesting to some.
- lmm 5y ago
  The tagging is even harder than the storage. There might well be high quality footage of live music from not much less than 100 years ago sitting on film reels in a shed somewhere - my university's library had a whole basement of pre-1850 books that they just hadn't had time to catalogue yet.
NoboruWataya 5y ago
Each individual meme or video might not be important, but then I don't think future historians are going to spend much time studying individual artifacts in detail in the same way that current historians do. We live in the age of big data and I think future historians will be focused on aggregating and automatically analysing that data. They probably won't be reading your comment or mine but they might analyse large sets of HN comments with a view to drawing conclusions about how particular demographics act, think and feel today. And if large swathes of those comments are lost the conclusions will be skewed, particularly if the loss is not random. Our society is characterised by the constant generation and exchange of massive amounts of information. It's one of the things that sets us apart from previous generations. Preserving only a small subset of that data that we deem worthy or important will not allow future generations to fully understand today's society.

codingdave 5y ago

If you grew up before the internet, surely you remember all the DIY manuals that lived in everyone's home. Everyone had that same big hardbound book of how to do basic home repairs. Many people had sewing books, electrical books, Chilton manuals for their cars. Cookbooks, too. We have valued how-to information for decades, and that interest and need far pre-dates the internet. So while I get what you are saying that much of the pop culture videos do not hold long-term value (which is also questionable considering how many of us older folk still have collections of vinyl)... there absolutely is valuable content out there that deserves preservation.

throwawayboise 5y ago
There will probably always be niche sources for specific "how to" information. YouTube is currently a low-effort way to make that generally available in video format, but it's certainly not the only viable solution, and the information you can get from a specific enthusiast site or forum is often better and more detailed.
majormajor 5y ago
Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives to check out those old how-to books, they're using contemporary sources on Youtube instead. And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in fifty years. I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my generation. It might temporarily have a lot of monetary value near my death - when other copies have already been lost - but to someone born fifty years after me? What use would pulp fiction from the 80s be to many of them? My parents and uncles are in a bit of disbelief of how little even I care about the Beatles already, after all.
- BatFastard 5y ago
  Well not caring for the Beatle is like not caring for Mozart. Bad taste is always an option in a free society.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Even people who care about Mozart's music largely have no idea how much other stuff from the time period they might have enjoyed that was lost, and that hypothetical loss is not ruining their life at all. We don't live dramatically longer or have dramatically larger memories than our ancestors, so things necessarily have to get lost and replaced by the new things that have been created since then.

mdoms 5y ago

You don't know what's important until much later. That's what makes archiving difficult. Also, important to whom?

krapp 5y ago

>I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? You might have a better understanding of the culture that produced them. You might appreciate a work of art that would otherwise not exist. We have graffiti from Pompeii, we know Ea-nasir sold cheap copper in ancient Ur 3700-odd years ago, but we've lost countless works of literature, music and film, some by the greatest masters of their age. What artifacts of culture survive the scouring sands of time is often a matter of happenstance, rather than quality. Chances are almost everything our species has produced culturally, scientifically and artistically - the whole corpus of our knowledge output over the last century - is going to vanish within a generation or two anyway, simply because the digital foundation into which we've transferred so much of it is brittle and ephemeral. If we want to leave anything behind for future generations at all besides climate change, pollution and nuclear waste, we should save as much as possible rather than only what we consider to be relevant.

Forbo 5y ago
Minor nitpick, it was ~1750 BC, so that would be around 3700 years ago.
- krapp 5y ago
  Oops, fair enough.

deeblering4 5y ago

These subjective questions are pointless to try and answer. The idea is that a future person could freely deep dive through a rich well indexed history of media about whatever specifically interests them I wish people would stop trying to assess the value of a given piece of media and just tag and archive the stuff. For instance, high quality footage of live music from 100 years ago would be very interesting to some.

lmm 5y ago
The tagging is even harder than the storage. There might well be high quality footage of live music from not much less than 100 years ago sitting on film reels in a shed somewhere - my university's library had a whole basement of pre-1850 books that they just hadn't had time to catalogue yet.

NoboruWataya 5y ago

Each individual meme or video might not be important, but then I don't think future historians are going to spend much time studying individual artifacts in detail in the same way that current historians do. We live in the age of big data and I think future historians will be focused on aggregating and automatically analysing that data. They probably won't be reading your comment or mine but they might analyse large sets of HN comments with a view to drawing conclusions about how particular demographics act, think and feel today. And if large swathes of those comments are lost the conclusions will be skewed, particularly if the loss is not random. Our society is characterised by the constant generation and exchange of massive amounts of information. It's one of the things that sets us apart from previous generations. Preserving only a small subset of that data that we deem worthy or important will not allow future generations to fully understand today's society.