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What happens to those private collections when those data hoarders die though? As the data hoarders die off the private collections will too as hard drives fail

What happens to those private collections when those data hoarders die though? As the data hoarders die off the private collections will too as hard drives fail and surviving family members, less passionate about preservation, inherit media and servers they don't know what to do with, much of which will just end up in the trash. If given enough warning about my own death I might be tempted to pay for a couple seedboxes on bulletproof servers and just hope the files stay up as long as possible and find many new homes before the money runs out. The RIAA/MPA can't come after you once you're dead.

dangus 2y ago
I think at some point we might need to accept that preserving every piece of human creation ever made is not possible and perhaps not even desirable. This is kind of the problem with data hoarding: it’s more about the act of preservation than the content being preserved. The whole practice is based off of anxiety and fear of loss rather than any productive purpose. There’s often low to zero demand for a huge amount of the content. Just like my grandma’s record collection or fine China, it all amounts to a bunch of stuff that meant something to someone else but not to me. It was offered to me in a vain hope that I might enjoy it in the same way, despite the great improbability of that being the case. That’s why those items are siting in a landfill somewhere. I would guess, for example, that most people read very few books that were written before the 1800s. They would be difficult to read, their subject matter would be foreign, and without extensive rewriting/translation/adaptation, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. Most certainly there are many classic works that survive much longer than a few hundred years, but the percentage is a tiny sliver of all the stories people have created. And that’s ultimately perfectly okay. That’s just how things work. Nobody has enough time on earth to consume such a massive amount of content that humans have made, and a lot of it is straight up bad, or just repetitive of other similar content. Lastly, there is also another possibility entirely: that the original creators don’t want future generations to see their work. I think it’s important to remember that all rights are reserved to the creator of the work. As an artist I can sell a print of a painting for a year and decide that it will never be sold again after that. It’s my right to stop selling new copies and my right to prevent people from redistributing copies until the work reaches public domain, because it’s my work. I know in the case of corporate filmmaking the lack of available works is more about apathy to specific old pieces of content basically being worthless to them, but it’s still a little point to keep in mind.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  A big part of preservation is curation. Even libraries throw away books that nobody lends for a certain amount of time. They have limited shelf space so they need to curate the collection periodically. Same with digital collections. Yes, it's easier to extend the space available, but it's still just hoarding unless you curate. Case in point: You can easily get every single Gameboy game for every Gameboy variant. BUT. You'll get _every single Gameboy game for every Gameboy variant_. That's thousands of games, in multiple languages and minor version variants. You'll also get rom hacked versions with different cheats enabled for the games. It's an immense pile of crap you (or someone) need to curate by hand to make it an actual collection of games. Going through your memories and multiple reviews checking which games are actually worth conserving and which were just shovelware is a ton of work.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - crtasm 2y ago
    Easy enough to avoid the romhacks, get the no-intro set: 2000 files, about 230mb. Archiving some lists of "best games" and "hidden gems" alongside it would be worthwhile indeed.

dangus 2y ago

I think at some point we might need to accept that preserving every piece of human creation ever made is not possible and perhaps not even desirable. This is kind of the problem with data hoarding: it’s more about the act of preservation than the content being preserved. The whole practice is based off of anxiety and fear of loss rather than any productive purpose. There’s often low to zero demand for a huge amount of the content. Just like my grandma’s record collection or fine China, it all amounts to a bunch of stuff that meant something to someone else but not to me. It was offered to me in a vain hope that I might enjoy it in the same way, despite the great improbability of that being the case. That’s why those items are siting in a landfill somewhere. I would guess, for example, that most people read very few books that were written before the 1800s. They would be difficult to read, their subject matter would be foreign, and without extensive rewriting/translation/adaptation, they wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. Most certainly there are many classic works that survive much longer than a few hundred years, but the percentage is a tiny sliver of all the stories people have created. And that’s ultimately perfectly okay. That’s just how things work. Nobody has enough time on earth to consume such a massive amount of content that humans have made, and a lot of it is straight up bad, or just repetitive of other similar content. Lastly, there is also another possibility entirely: that the original creators don’t want future generations to see their work. I think it’s important to remember that all rights are reserved to the creator of the work. As an artist I can sell a print of a painting for a year and decide that it will never be sold again after that. It’s my right to stop selling new copies and my right to prevent people from redistributing copies until the work reaches public domain, because it’s my work. I know in the case of corporate filmmaking the lack of available works is more about apathy to specific old pieces of content basically being worthless to them, but it’s still a little point to keep in mind.

theshrike79 2y ago
A big part of preservation is curation. Even libraries throw away books that nobody lends for a certain amount of time. They have limited shelf space so they need to curate the collection periodically. Same with digital collections. Yes, it's easier to extend the space available, but it's still just hoarding unless you curate. Case in point: You can easily get every single Gameboy game for every Gameboy variant. BUT. You'll get _every single Gameboy game for every Gameboy variant_. That's thousands of games, in multiple languages and minor version variants. You'll also get rom hacked versions with different cheats enabled for the games. It's an immense pile of crap you (or someone) need to curate by hand to make it an actual collection of games. Going through your memories and multiple reviews checking which games are actually worth conserving and which were just shovelware is a ton of work.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- crtasm 2y ago
  Easy enough to avoid the romhacks, get the no-intro set: 2000 files, about 230mb. Archiving some lists of "best games" and "hidden gems" alongside it would be worthwhile indeed.