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Why? Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? The web currently is suffering from an abundance of practically the opposite problem: the percept

by XorNot 5y ago

Why? Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? The web currently is suffering from an abundance of practically the opposite problem: the perception, though not the reality, that a lot of commentary is "off the record" - aka equivalent to a conversation in a coffee shop - when this could not be further from the truth. Most social media controversies start from this basic mismatch - the perception of social media commentary as though its like that you might share with your friends, but published, openly accessibly and archived for all the world to see - context which would temper most people from pretending that a comment should stand alone rather then in proper context. The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem. If people are attached to their content but not backing it up in case of disaster, then I fail to see how that's anyone else's problem - your lack of planning does not constitute anyone else's crisis or obligation. POSSE is in fact a correct reaction to this issue: starting from the presumption that your "free" hosting will remain so was a delusion that everyone capable of even a little systemic thinking should've seen as a risk - obviously you're going to lose that as soon as whatever invisible accounting applies to you no longer pays the bills.

rektide 5y ago
> Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme. We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.
- majormajor 5y ago
  I care about who I am offline even more than online. Should I be pushing for persistent 24/7 video surveillance of public space, stores, malls, parks, etc, so that I can revisit all of that too without making my own effort to preserve what I find important?
  - rektide 5y ago
    On the one hand: Posting content online & expecting it to stick around, and perhaps getting banned years down the road & losing it To: Whether or not we should have an expectation of our activity in stores/malls/parks accessible publicly & to us in pereptuity. Can you spot the difference? Is it clear to others that these cases aren't the same? This is a question of expectation & intent. No one has a reasonable expectation that what we do in a store/mall/park endure & be remembered. When we post into comments & threads in public spaces, and it lasts for years, & gets removed for some fault or issue, obliterated forever, that's a surprising change. What we did in parks has never been part of the public discourse. What we do online always has been. The differences are obvious. What we do online, for many of us, speaks much more closely to who we really are, because we are entailed into the bigger conversations happening, operating in a global sphere. Your local sphere probably isn't that relevant, and it was never going to be preserved anyways. Generally I just think it's bad form to assert your own priorities & value-systems over everyone elses. I don't think you've allowed room for other ways of seeing things. I think there's a lot of relative merits to both. Our online identities contain a lot of carefully-constructed thought that we would clearly want to be able to access, that most people will be free to access: the denial of that, in a shocking surprising manner, is obviously harmful & traumatic. Trying to steamroll that basic fact with some kind of Real World Real Talk comes off way bad to me.
vba616 5y ago
>The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem Saying "the web never forgets" is very, very wrong if people interpret it to mean that you can count on anything that happened being preserved. There's two aspects to that, things that disappear in the sense they aren't easily searchable (or at all), and things that get revised, such that you think they are available, but history has effectively been changed. A virtue of physical books is that they can't easily be changed without a trace. Archive.org is something, but very far from comprehensive.

by XorNot 5y ago

rektide 5y ago

> Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme. We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.

majormajor 5y ago
I care about who I am offline even more than online. Should I be pushing for persistent 24/7 video surveillance of public space, stores, malls, parks, etc, so that I can revisit all of that too without making my own effort to preserve what I find important?
- rektide 5y ago
  On the one hand: Posting content online & expecting it to stick around, and perhaps getting banned years down the road & losing it To: Whether or not we should have an expectation of our activity in stores/malls/parks accessible publicly & to us in pereptuity. Can you spot the difference? Is it clear to others that these cases aren't the same? This is a question of expectation & intent. No one has a reasonable expectation that what we do in a store/mall/park endure & be remembered. When we post into comments & threads in public spaces, and it lasts for years, & gets removed for some fault or issue, obliterated forever, that's a surprising change. What we did in parks has never been part of the public discourse. What we do online always has been. The differences are obvious. What we do online, for many of us, speaks much more closely to who we really are, because we are entailed into the bigger conversations happening, operating in a global sphere. Your local sphere probably isn't that relevant, and it was never going to be preserved anyways. Generally I just think it's bad form to assert your own priorities & value-systems over everyone elses. I don't think you've allowed room for other ways of seeing things. I think there's a lot of relative merits to both. Our online identities contain a lot of carefully-constructed thought that we would clearly want to be able to access, that most people will be free to access: the denial of that, in a shocking surprising manner, is obviously harmful & traumatic. Trying to steamroll that basic fact with some kind of Real World Real Talk comes off way bad to me.

vba616 5y ago

>The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem Saying "the web never forgets" is very, very wrong if people interpret it to mean that you can count on anything that happened being preserved. There's two aspects to that, things that disappear in the sense they aren't easily searchable (or at all), and things that get revised, such that you think they are available, but history has effectively been changed. A virtue of physical books is that they can't easily be changed without a trace. Archive.org is something, but very far from comprehensive.