[HN Gopher] The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet
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The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet
Author : knight-errantry
Score : 25 points
Date : 2021-05-18 05:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cheapskatesguide.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cheapskatesguide.org)
| mode80 wrote:
| If you can forgive the fact that a blockchain is involved,
| arweave.org offers a credible solution to this.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| The transitory nature of things in general is why I've been a big
| fan of archival since childhood, and why I've become a data
| hoarder. If there's anything particularly noteworthy or
| interesting, I try to save it. The amount of genuinely
| insightful, knowledgeable, or even just entertaining content in
| the world is staggering, and to me it's worth preserving. But you
| can't trust online storage because you never know when something
| like Google Photos will stop being an option.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| If you've managed to successfully collect and organize all the
| noteworthy and interesting bits of info you've run into since
| childhood, the tools and techniques you used would make for a
| very interesting essay at least, book perhaps.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _We are told that content posted on the Internet lasts forever.
| This is an oversimplification. While some content can last for
| decades, nothing is eternal, not even on the Internet. The whole
| truth is that content survives only as long as some person or
| organization is willing to pay to host it. Servers, electricity,
| and network bandwidth cost money._
|
| Hosting ,electricity, and bandwidth are cheap. it is more likely
| someone will forget to renew the domain than not be able to
| afford it.
|
| _What survives is completely dependent upon the values, tastes,
| and perspectives of the parties hosting it. Much of what the
| Internet contains has an extremely short shelf-life when compared
| to the rest of history._
|
| yeah that's cause the stuff you see is the stuff that survived.
| Most artifact are lost or destroyed.
|
| _For many of us, perhaps for most of us, much of what we post
| will be more or less hidden in obscurity until it finally
| disappears forever. And, very likely our most profound insights
| will have the briefest endurance in a society that seems to value
| only small ideas, easily digested_
|
| But the consequences of having your stuff be visible can be great
| and there is no guarantee it will vanish on its own in any
| reasonable time frame. Mirror repositories can index content long
| after it has been deleted by the original owner.
|
| This person vastly underestimates how permanent the internet is.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I could understand a personal blog disappearing, but even major
| news websites aren't archived or mirrored except for bigger
| articles.
|
| Sure, publish your personal data and it's on the internet
| forever, but publish a well thought out essay on identity over
| time and it's easily lost. Media is much, much worse.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| As of the early 1970s, broadcast TV news networks routinely
| recycled video footage and had no in-house library or
| research services.
|
| Addressed in Edward Jay Epstein's _News from Nowhere_ (1973).
|
| https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst/page/n5/m.
| ..
|
| Early entertainment programming was also often not saved.
| Some present archives exist soley because audience members
| "pirated" copies off the air.
|
| Preservation of commercially-motivated product is often a
| very low priority. (Ironic given the US's Mickey Mouse
| copyright legislation.)
| legerdemain wrote:
| > I don't know why she took down her blog. I hope > it was
| not because she decided to embrace the > drab adulthood she
| feared in her teens.
|
| I think the author is projecting, and also baselessly attacking
| the simple, rich, meaningful lives so many people naturally grow
| into. At this stage in my life, I find more meaning in "doing"
| the dishes or knocking back a cold one with other dads at soccer
| practice, than I do writing a "meaningful" blog post as if I'm
| some big important nabob like NNT.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I think the solution to this lies in peer-to-peer. Accessing
| content from other users directly from the IP addresses they have
| been assigned. The internet as used without paid hosting
| companies and advertising-supported intermediaries (free hosting
| on social media, or other forms of middlemen). Even IP addresses,
| i.e., accounts with ISPs, are often transitory over the course of
| a lifetime, so there is no "perfect" solution. Why store content
| exclusively with third parties. Store content offline on
| removable storage. Take it with you from computer to computer,
| ISP to ISP. Today, it is easier than ever, though maybe not "easy
| enough", to share content from home, peer-to-peer. That is,
| without using a hosting company, social media website, etc. The
| OP correctly identifies "popularity" as a problem. If you filter
| all your thinking about the internet through the lens of
| "popularity" (like Google and Facebook, and the thousands of
| "tech" wannabes) then you are dead in the water. That is how the
| "tech" people want you to think. The only content that is
| important in their world is popular content. Because they rely on
| advertising to support themselves, that is how they _must_ think.
| You, the user, do not have to rely on advertising. You do not
| need to care about popularity. You do not have to be an unpaid
| content producer for "tech" companies.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| I find the idea that a peer to peer network would be more
| efficient or capable of long time storage laughable.
| teddyh wrote:
| If you think that's transitory, have you seen FaceBook?
| _Twitter_? If it's not from like this week or newer, it's
| effectively gone forever, impossible to find again.
| jandrese wrote:
| I dare people to try to find article they saw on Reddit a week
| ago. It's pretty much impossible. The built-in search feature
| is worse than useless and even Google's index struggles unless
| you remember the title exactly, and even then it can be a
| crapshoot.
| dqv wrote:
| I can usually get pretty close even months later but some
| things escape. It can be frustrating to spend a long time
| trying to find an article you forgot about and then not
| finding it.
|
| If I can remember part of the title, I always put that in
| quotes and if I see something I know it's not I use the term
| exclusion feature.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The Camas Reddit search has saved my bacon on numerous
| occasions.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Reddit's search is more useful than is generally given credit
| for, though it's not spectacular.
|
| Searching _link submissions_ on Reddit is all but impossible,
| given that the search targets are typically just the link
| title itself. If you have a given URL and you want to see if
| there was any Reddit discussion, you 'll have far better
| luck. (Use the "url:<urlspec>" syntax).
|
| For _self posts_ (that is, original content submitted to
| Reddit as text), the likelihood of a hit is far larger as
| there 's much more text to search off of.
|
| Even better: you can restrict search by the date-range
| presets, or if you don't mind submitting Unix timestamps, any
| arbitrary date specification in a signed 32-bit range. You
| can also restrict search by subreddit or submitter, among
| other criteria.
|
| I've made ... reasonably good use of Reddit as an essay
| repository with the ability to recall any of somewhat over
| 500 items over the past decade or so, posted to a personal
| subreddit. It helps of course that I usually have some idea
| of the language I'd use, and/or repeat myself a lot.
|
| There are limitations. Reddit doesn't index _comments_ , and
| searching large subreddits or globally is now quite difficult
| due to the sheer volume of submissions. I wouldn't say
| Reddit's search is _great_ , but used with intention, it's
| serviceable.
|
| (The rest of the site is ... failing spectacularly to serve
| my needs, I'm not endorsing it at all. But search actually
| does provide utility.)
|
| These days I find HN an even more useful personal pattern
| repository, thanks to Algolia and the "by:<username>" filter.
| paulpauper wrote:
| it is easy. google indexes almost everything posted on
| reddit. use site:reddit.com
|
| Google index works better than you think . YOu just have to
| remember the sub and a few keywords.
|
| You can narrow google search by sub too
| truth_ wrote:
| Search- `from:handle term`
|
| And there are other nice tricks.
| teddyh wrote:
| Sure, and the Internet Archive has the Wayback Machine. But
| these are not commonly known and used tools, so for normal
| people, everything is a constant now, and whatever is
| yesterday is forgotten.
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(page generated 2021-05-20 23:01 UTC)