6 ms·

Without trying to be contrarian, I don't think that everything should be archived. Random tweets, random blog posts, random personal web sites. Let them wither

by elric 5y ago

Without trying to be contrarian, I don't think that everything should be archived. Random tweets, random blog posts, random personal web sites. Let them wither and die and be forgotten. Notable content by notable people? Sure. Everyone else ought to have the right to be forgotten, including some drunk tweet they wrote 10 years ago and regret, or an old personal page which contained too much PII. Archive no longer has a way to opt-out, which is bad enough, but I still think they should be opt-in.

jacquesm 5y ago
You never know in advance what will and what will not be worthwhile archiving, you only know that at some unspecified point in the future.
- elric 5y ago
  That's lovely from the perspective of a historian 200 years in the future. But it does not nothing to alleviate the pain of people living in the present. People whose prospective employers comb over their embarrassing past. Or bullies. Or any other number of evildoers whose life is made easier by unfettered access to indelible information.
  - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
    I don't like your proposed solution that uses right to be forgotten as a blunt instrument to paper over serious problems, to used a mixed metaphor. When you appeal to the right to be forgotten to fix problems like people and "prospective employers comb over their embarrassing past", it's a way of throwing up your hands and neglecting deeper issues. In a right-to-be-forgotten world, the way it would end up going is: 1. problematic potentates punish pitiable proles 2. someone invokes right to be forgotten 3. this is considered "good enough" 4. the problem conditions that allowed #1 to fester remain uncorrected I feel this way about a lot of stuff these days (especially the where the erosion of the tenets of a liberal society is involved), where people argue vociferously for a "solution" that can at best be considered an indirect way of handling the problem. You see this with a lot of contemporary calls for the dismantling of tradition of free speech/free inquire/freedom of association, for example. People end up chafing in the direction of proposals that have dual-use effects in the first instance and perniciously "null" effects in the second instance.
stared 5y ago
Most of history we know is from the perspective of the wealthies 0.1%. Even though the Internet is still biased towards the wealthier and more educated, having a history of the wealthies 10% would be enormous progress.
jl6 5y ago
Perhaps the Internet Archive could do more to help people who find their personal/sensitive/embarrassing content made available in perpetuity (I’m not sure exactly what they could do), but it’s incredibly valuable to have archiving on by default. The voice of un-notable people is underrepresented in every field of study, and the voice of notable people tends to get preserved in other ways anyway.
- jjkaczor 5y ago
  It is helpful to get the perspectives of "un-notable" people from a historical perspective. For example - the graffiti at Pompeii is interesting (and is pretty much at the same "quality bar" as Twitter): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrienne-was-here/475719/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie... https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...
generationP 5y ago
Who decides what "notable" is? I frequently use the Archive to find old academic grey lit (preprints, lecture notes, newsgroup posts, etc.). Much of it is on "random" blog posts and personal websites. Even the authors aren't usually notable by Wikipedia standards. Yeah, there is some PII on those pages, but also treasures of useful information.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Historians spend a lot of time pouring over minutia from non-notable people. There is plenty about the world that doesn't seem worth writing down, but can be intuited from tangential texts. The costs seems low enough to just keep it.
- dogorman 5y ago
  From what I understand, present day historians are sitting on a huge pile of cuneiform tablets that have yet to be transcribed or translated because there is much more material than there is interest/manpower. Of course, to your point, they do keep it around. They don't just throw it in the trash.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    Only a tiny number of people in the world can read Sumerian or Akkadian, even for them the process is slow and error prone because we are missing a lot of the original context, and they have better things to do than skim through piles of delivery receipts. * * * It would be pretty neat if someone could figure out how to OCR all the cuneiform tablets and turn them into something searchable.
ignoramous 5y ago
> Random tweets, random blog posts, random personal web sites. Let them wither and die and be forgotten. Notable content by notable people? Sure. Well, it isn't named the Internet Encyclopedia, for a reason. > Without trying to be contrarian, I don't think that everything should be archived It isn't contrarian. The deletionists are seemingly the majority. It is contrarian to in fact archive all. the. things.

by elric 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

You never know in advance what will and what will not be worthwhile archiving, you only know that at some unspecified point in the future.

elric 5y ago
That's lovely from the perspective of a historian 200 years in the future. But it does not nothing to alleviate the pain of people living in the present. People whose prospective employers comb over their embarrassing past. Or bullies. Or any other number of evildoers whose life is made easier by unfettered access to indelible information.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  I don't like your proposed solution that uses right to be forgotten as a blunt instrument to paper over serious problems, to used a mixed metaphor. When you appeal to the right to be forgotten to fix problems like people and "prospective employers comb over their embarrassing past", it's a way of throwing up your hands and neglecting deeper issues. In a right-to-be-forgotten world, the way it would end up going is: 1. problematic potentates punish pitiable proles 2. someone invokes right to be forgotten 3. this is considered "good enough" 4. the problem conditions that allowed #1 to fester remain uncorrected I feel this way about a lot of stuff these days (especially the where the erosion of the tenets of a liberal society is involved), where people argue vociferously for a "solution" that can at best be considered an indirect way of handling the problem. You see this with a lot of contemporary calls for the dismantling of tradition of free speech/free inquire/freedom of association, for example. People end up chafing in the direction of proposals that have dual-use effects in the first instance and perniciously "null" effects in the second instance.

stared 5y ago

Most of history we know is from the perspective of the wealthies 0.1%. Even though the Internet is still biased towards the wealthier and more educated, having a history of the wealthies 10% would be enormous progress.

jl6 5y ago

Perhaps the Internet Archive could do more to help people who find their personal/sensitive/embarrassing content made available in perpetuity (I’m not sure exactly what they could do), but it’s incredibly valuable to have archiving on by default. The voice of un-notable people is underrepresented in every field of study, and the voice of notable people tends to get preserved in other ways anyway.

jjkaczor 5y ago
It is helpful to get the perspectives of "un-notable" people from a historical perspective. For example - the graffiti at Pompeii is interesting (and is pretty much at the same "quality bar" as Twitter): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrienne-was-here/475719/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie... https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...

generationP 5y ago

Who decides what "notable" is? I frequently use the Archive to find old academic grey lit (preprints, lecture notes, newsgroup posts, etc.). Much of it is on "random" blog posts and personal websites. Even the authors aren't usually notable by Wikipedia standards. Yeah, there is some PII on those pages, but also treasures of useful information.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

Historians spend a lot of time pouring over minutia from non-notable people. There is plenty about the world that doesn't seem worth writing down, but can be intuited from tangential texts. The costs seems low enough to just keep it.

dogorman 5y ago
From what I understand, present day historians are sitting on a huge pile of cuneiform tablets that have yet to be transcribed or translated because there is much more material than there is interest/manpower. Of course, to your point, they do keep it around. They don't just throw it in the trash.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Only a tiny number of people in the world can read Sumerian or Akkadian, even for them the process is slow and error prone because we are missing a lot of the original context, and they have better things to do than skim through piles of delivery receipts. * * * It would be pretty neat if someone could figure out how to OCR all the cuneiform tablets and turn them into something searchable.

ignoramous 5y ago

> Random tweets, random blog posts, random personal web sites. Let them wither and die and be forgotten. Notable content by notable people? Sure. Well, it isn't named the Internet Encyclopedia, for a reason. > Without trying to be contrarian, I don't think that everything should be archived It isn't contrarian. The deletionists are seemingly the majority. It is contrarian to in fact archive all. the. things.