[HN Gopher] 'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life
___________________________________________________________________
'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life
Author : hunter-2
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-03-25 11:14 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| skohan wrote:
| Screenshots
| ant_li0n wrote:
| I wasn't really into MySpace much in those days. I didn't have
| many friends and I never quite figured out how to make friends
| there. When Facebook came along, I was inundated with friends and
| the utility was lost on me there, too.
|
| One piece of the early internet that I do grieve for is a MUD I
| played in the 90s. I remember when I first found it, and it was
| the only MUD I ever played.
|
| I had heard about this awesome new game called Ultima Online, and
| there were some great blogs telling stories from the Alpha
| release. I signed up for the Beta (don't think I ever was
| accepted?) but in the meantime I scoured UO forums and that's
| where I found that MUD. I think I honestly only played it for
| about 2 years but those were absolutely some of the most fun
| times I ever had on the internet. I think at max the server only
| had 30 or 40 people on it, and the codebase must have been
| absolute garbage because it would lag out periodically and you'd
| lose connection or get killed.
|
| I really wish that place had survived, or in the very least I
| wish it had been documented. Such an amazing thing, it makes me
| sad to think about.
|
| Nowadays, we've come to appreciate the fact that things will
| disappear off the internet, and people are preserving them. I
| know, like the article, "it's not the same," and you can't go
| back in time by just viewing a site on the wayback machine. I'm
| still glad that people are doing this kind of work, preserving
| these stories.
| ehnto wrote:
| We don't, which can be a shame, but it's not like we used to be
| able to memorialize everyone's entire history of conversation and
| achievement so it's not a particularly new problem.
| raghuveerdotnet wrote:
| Agree on one level, but on the contrary, if we give the medium
| its due, it is much more conducive to memorialization than the
| pre-digitized/non-digitized world. I think this question might
| help future "anthropologist-like" professionals to go about
| understanding the developments much better than what we can do
| today. This is to say that there is significantly better
| contextual returns when asking this question in a digitised
| environment than in a non-digitized environment like in-person
| physical conversations and other similar events.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Agreed. Not everything is worth saving. You aren't special.
| That's okay.
| arkitaip wrote:
| I think everyone is special enough that their life data
| warrants preserving. If archeology and history has taught us
| anything, is that we are curious about the daily lives of
| ordinary people, to be able to understand and delete to our
| ancestors.
| michaelt wrote:
| It's not clear to me that you really do someone a favour by
| archiving their data forever.
|
| An awful lot of digging into people's past online is done
| for mean-spirited reasons like finding something to
| embarrass them.
| lupire wrote:
| Archaeologists don't want _everyone_ 's data. They want
| samples.
| jakubp wrote:
| Were you never curious "What did the Romans or Egyptians
| really think about X? How did they really spend their
| days?"
|
| I know I am curious and history books leave more
| questions than answers. Even the most well preserved
| facts about kings/dynasties/wars are partial at best and
| leave out so many interesting things out...
|
| My feeling is that archeologists et al would love 10x or
| 1000x more data about what happened in the past -- not to
| have to guess everything and never be sure "is that
| really what happened?"
| DC1350 wrote:
| Memorializing life online is the reason people get fired for
| saying homophobic stuff at a time when even most left wing
| politicians were anti gay marriage (>= 8 years ago). I don't want
| this. I would use social media a lot more if everything was
| deleted after 24 hours because I can't tell the future and I
| don't know what will be taboo in 5 years
| slindz wrote:
| That is a fascinating insight to me. (the temporary social
| media thing)
|
| Does such a thing exist?
|
| I'm sitting here fighting urges to build a prototype.
| seany wrote:
| Most of the chan boards do this.
| livueta wrote:
| It's also worth noting that many of the chan boards are
| also publicly archived, though the effect of that is
| mitigated by no/ephemeral identities.
| andrewzah wrote:
| You could do this on pretty much any site, given access to
| javascript. I remember doing this for facebook before I
| deleted my account ~6 years ago.
|
| There are people on mastodon/pleroma who have scripts that
| automatically do that for posts older than 30 days, etc.
|
| Snapchat and instagram stories are ephemeral, but those are
| different from traditional social media with posts.
| reidjs wrote:
| Yes, snapchat and instagram stories are examples of temporary
| social media products
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Politics aside,
|
| Telepath is premised on post ephemerality and AFAICT also does
| not allow text cut and paste.
|
| No stopping screen shots etc but ftr.
|
| * that there is no stopping screen shots etc. is arguably the
| real topic; until such time as there is true revolt,
| surveillance capital renders inert any idea of personal
| invisibility, opting out, or avoidance of future accountability
| for contemporary actions, as you suggest.
|
| As well known in this forum, there is no escape, not using
| incognito mode, not using TOR, not opting out of the
| sociopathic Facebook ecosystem which happily profiles you based
| on tagging and public data... we live in the panopticon.
|
| Those of us who are not stainless steel rats should moderate
| our expectations accordingly. :|
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Do we have to?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Memorialize life online? To what end? Seems rather self
| important.
| throwaway000345 wrote:
| Why do we take snapshots of life at any place and time? Why do
| we study history at all? Because those who come after will
| benefit from knowing from whence they came.
| newswasboring wrote:
| This is weird. History, at least as it's colloquially used,
| is a accounting of important events in the past. We study
| history so we don't make major mistakes. Surely you are not
| implying everything online is important?
| PeterisP wrote:
| History does study and consider important records and
| artifacts that inform us about daily life of ordinary
| people in that time and place, it's not limited to
| "important events" according to some measure of importance.
|
| For example, we consider valuable early writing on clay
| tablets that refers to accounting records, recipes and
| personal letters of ancient Mesopotamia (e.g. https://www.a
| rchaeology.org/issues/214-features/cuneiform/43...) which
| provide insight on how these people lived even if they
| provide no information on any specific major event.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > This is weird. History, at least as it's colloquially
| used, is a accounting of important events in the past. We
| study history so we don't make major mistakes. Surely you
| are not implying everything online is important?
|
| That's an extremely limited, pretty old-fashioned view of
| history. There was literally a post just the other day
| about Latin grammatical genders that mentioned that
| linguists obsess over a few fragments of graffiti because
| that's all that's left that hints at how Latin was actually
| spoken by the commoners whose speech became the Romance
| languages. Other historians spend their time studying
| contracts and receipts from transactions involving cattle
| and grain of long dead Sumerian traders. There are many
| schools of history that are more concerned with how common
| people lived in ordinary and extraordinary times than great
| men and "important events" (e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History#Social_history). An
| important function of history is satisfying people's
| curiosity about the past.
| andrewzah wrote:
| History is not only for important events. It's also
| important to understand the daily lives of past
| civilizations. A lot of mundane stuff was simply never
| written down, so we'll never know in a lot of cases.
|
| One unique problem of our era is storing things digitally.
| If a huge event were to occur, wiping out humanity,
| archeologists won't be able to study ssds in thousands of
| years like we can study physical artifacts today.
| [deleted]
| Razengan wrote:
| > _To what end?_
|
| The question to every answer.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Memorialize life online? To what end? Seems rather self
| important.
|
| Why are we sometimes curious what our great grandparents did,
| and why don't we just put our dead in the trash heap with the
| rest of our waste?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| The mental projection of your digital self. Do you think
| that's air you're breathing now?
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Indeed. Of all the information I'm inadvertently exposed during
| the day, there's maybe 1 piece that's worth remembering
| tomorrow - maybe. I bet I'm with the absolute majority in this
| case as well.
|
| In fact I've started the habit of deleting everything after a
| period of inactivity - be it computer history or social history
| - because it's either important and saved properly or it's not.
|
| Certainly the world wouldn't loose heritage if random blogs,
| facebook, instagram, youtube went away, same as no one at large
| mourns the disappearance of usenet .. or myspace.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Certainly the world wouldn't loose heritage if random
| blogs, facebook, instagram, youtube went away, same as no one
| at large mourns the disappearance of usenet .. or myspace.
|
| I don't know if I entirely agree. Historians of past eras
| work to piece together an understanding of the time based on
| scraps and fragments.
|
| How rich might history be if we could see the views of tens
| of thousands of people, instead of hundreds?
|
| Like you imply, the status quo for future generations looking
| back on this time will be no worse than what we have looking
| bad at the 18th century. In fact, it will be much better for
| future historians looking at the present. But there's a real
| potential to make it so much better!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Like when historians say "In this letter, Abraham Lincoln
| said". If the data is missing, coming generations won't know
| what Trump1 said.
|
| 1 Only using him as an example because he is an influential
| person who used an online medium to communicate
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Fair, but we do archive that stuff on public record. I just
| am not seeing the leap to what I imagine to be next: digital
| version of nature reserves. I like preserving nature in
| concept, but preserving digital stuff just for the sake of
| keeping it around, not sure if it should be a priority. Just
| like historical building remodel laws, I get it, might not
| always be the right move but that is contextual, just not
| sure such a thing should leak into the digital world.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Definitely agree that preventing change is a bad thing. I
| think the digital world allows copying so we can both
| preserve and progress, as the Internet Archive has proven.
| leptoniscool wrote:
| Google and facebook has around 100gb of data on me. I would just
| export it.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Google and facebook has around 100gb of data on me. I would
| just export it.
|
| The exports are garbage, though. What good is an archive of my
| comments when they don't contain any of the rest of the
| conversation, or even information about what they were in
| response to?
|
| I'm literally looking at my FB comment export right now, and
| everything is "Tablespoon commented on his own post: Some
| sentence that makes little sense out of context."
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| The comments so far were replying superficially to the article
| title. I've changed the HN title above to the HTML doc title now,
| which describes the project that this article is actually about.
| Please either respond to the interesting substance or (always an
| option!) don't respond. A 5-second reaction to a 2-second title
| isn't usually very interesting.
| golemotron wrote:
| NFTs
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Hrm. I can only imagine the Yahoo! Chat room issue, or "What was
| IRC like in 1990?" edition. I could see a few on Myspace alone
| (here's to Tom, I hope he got some "fuck you money" out of the
| deal). And so many Livejournal communities!
|
| I am older than the usual skew of the HN demographic and I can
| only say that a lot of this feels like surfing or stepping off of
| one escalator and onto another. Yes, you can do it smoothly but
| at some point the endless transition from one thing to another
| feels shallow, and the gossamer threads of personal relationships
| between you and someone else on a vanishing Internet community
| snapping might only be heard by the smallest of web spiders.
| Businesses shutter, call some place Paradise and kiss it goodbye,
| new moderators decide to "pivot" or the gentle incoming surf of
| Eternal September rises like a tsunami and washes it all away.
|
| We may have become perversely attached to the impermanence of
| things and, if so, may be then treating one another with less
| depth than can be kind. Nobody names mayflies.
| stakkur wrote:
| There is no 'online life'. There's just life, and technology is
| only one part of it. Often, not a very important part.
| datameta wrote:
| To contrast, I'll take your comment and change a few words to
| reflect what many in our world today hold to be true - those to
| whom internet communication is the vast majority or the
| entirety of their socialization/hobbies/entertainment/news. I
| would argue this has never been more of a reality for more
| people than during the past year.
|
| They might say something like:
|
| There is no 'online life'. There's just life, and technology is
| a huge part of it. Often, the most important part.
| t0r0nat0r wrote:
| I feel this article creates a problem which doesn't exist. Tons
| of stuff is bound to disappear, and it won't make any difference
| as humanity will not have any way of processing these vast
| amounts of data retroactively.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Why not? Processing power and storage will be so vast and cheap
| that you could simulate the entire tech stack regardless of the
| platform, data formats, etc.
| goodlinks wrote:
| Is there some way to combine the internet archive with proof
| of stake crypto? ;)
| boogies wrote:
| Isn't that what Filecoin is?
| tomaszs wrote:
| Well maybe. However with social media taking so much time is
| everyone life a part of the life will also be forgotten. You
| could cut newspaper parts you liked, write a diary. No one told
| you you can't cut a piece of newspaper and preserve it. Or take
| a photo.
|
| It was easy. Now it is almost impossible to save your
| experience. Applications block copying text from messages eg.
| Instagram. Block you from downloading images eg. Google, and
| from saving videos (eg. Tiktok).
|
| Today technology leans towards blocking people of having a
| recall of what they see, hear and read online. It is hard to
| not have the feeling that we are losing something each day
| forever.
|
| Not being able to go back to something that i have experienced
| is a loss to me.
|
| I hope there will be some change around it, because I think
| that a person experiencing something has the right to preserve
| the experience. It was a default law. But now it is taken away
| from us.
|
| No one is however protesting not noticing some kind of very
| personal, natural freedom is slowly taken away from us. The
| freedom of having a memory.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| You can still keep a diary. Online isn't real anyway. It's
| electronic bits; ephemeral by its nature.
| lupire wrote:
| You can take a screenshot or photo of almost anything.
| livueta wrote:
| I think the parent does make a good point that it is
| getting harder to keep your hands on your own ephemera,
| especially in usable/meaningful forms (i.e. I'd say a GDPR
| dump of context-free comments isn't that meaningful).
|
| The example that comes to mind personally is chat logs: I
| have a fairly complete record of IRC conversations. It's
| not like I read them daily, but it is often nice to be able
| to refer back to, especially if I'm shooting the shit with
| friends or something and we can't remember who was actually
| the best at AoEII LAN. These logs were produced by my
| client(s) by default.
|
| That same friend group later migrated to Skype. I have no
| Skype logs at all, and there's a several-year gap in chat
| history before we ended up back on IRC. Could I have come
| up with some kind of logging solution? Probably, but I
| didn't, and now I'm sad about that and wish that the Skype
| client had been more aligned with my interests as a user,
| but I guess that's what I get for using proprietary
| software in the first place.
|
| So yes, sure, you can technically screenshot everything if
| you try hard enough, but the location/accessibility of
| digital ephemera has definitely moved away from end-users,
| toward corporations, as centralization advanced and clients
| regressed from user-agents to informers.
| jonas21 wrote:
| People have been chatting with other people in real life
| for millennia with no logs or records. Being able to save
| chat logs is a bit of a quirk of the online world, isn't
| it?
| tomaszs wrote:
| I'd argue that having a memory of the past was and is one
| of the things people always aimed to have. It is part of
| being a human being. Even thousands of years ago people
| saved their stories on cave walls.
| livueta wrote:
| Well sure, but that's true for plenty other quirks of
| modernity: the fact that we got along without them for
| millennia doesn't necessarily say anything about their
| present usefulness.
|
| Chat logs are just an example, and maybe not a very good
| one because of the pre-digital analogue you point out:
| let's try screenshots of gameplay. I used to use a third-
| party tool to take screenshots/clips and upload them to a
| server. I still have all the clips and pics from these.
| These days, that functionality is often part of whatever
| game service framework you're operating in. A while ago a
| friend's account got banned, and that wiped out all the
| screenshots and clips stored by the service.
| Centralization and moves away from open protocols makes
| it easier for that type of situation, where you don't
| actually own a copy of content you're creating, to come
| about.
| markstos wrote:
| "How do we memorialize the current moment when it's constantly
| disappearing?"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| domano wrote:
| On the actual books page ( http://www.instarbooks.com/remember-
| the-internet.html ) i love the form field title animation. I
| thought it was just a gif, but the form fields are clickable.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-25 23:01 UTC)