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Shining a light on the digital dark age

longnow.org

91–100 of 137 posts

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#91

I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of our local pop music... The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ... but the older songs are disappearing. Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of the data in the OVH datacenter fire and s…

"I'm sure that there are data hoarders somewhere, that have mp3s of all those songs somewhere, but unless we get some p2p type of service like gnutella/ed2k/kazaa working again, I won't be able to find them anymore." Such archives would need to be kept online though. If only archived (or hoarded), it's just data in a box that no-one can access. Current internet is really poor at handling this long tail. Eg. a movie c…

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Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#92
In 2008 I've created a SaaS that shutdown in 2015 (had great LTV and super low churn, just had none doing the growth side and at the time I was immature to raise a seed). Turns out, today I don't even have the code in a proper format and it would be valuable to have it as reference as lots of good ideas where used into the internal architecture. If I'm lucky, it's stored in some old DVDs that I've in a drawer.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#94

I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of our local pop music... The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ... but the older songs are disappearing. Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of the data in the OVH datacenter fire and s…

There was some cool, obscure music on the original? mp3.com, bands that never made it beyond that site. Never made it to OiNK or what.cd, etc. either

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#95

I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of our local pop music... The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ... but the older songs are disappearing. Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of the data in the OVH datacenter fire and s…

There was some cool, obscure music on the original? mp3.com, bands that never made it beyond that site. Never made it to OiNK or what.cd, etc. either

Mp3.com purposefully breaking the law to prove a point screwed over an untold number of indie artists. IMHO it was a shitty thing for them to do.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#96
The dead sea scrolls lasted hundreds of years and yet 99.9% of other thoughts, ideas and songs have been lost. Maybe it's okay that things are forgotten to be rediscovered in new ways. Maybe death and rebirth is what gives the world of knowledge and stories its vitality and to grasp it forever would be to use the gravestone as your storage medium.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#98
Photobucket recently asked for me to pay for service because they don't do free anymore. I was hosting an old, old forum signature and little else, it was a nice bit of nostalgia.

I made sure the backed-up copy on my machine was ok. Then I purged my bucket and am proceeding to delete my long-stagnant account.

Can't fault them for trying to make money but it sure seems capitalism is a big fan of entropy. And it's good to remember that you see your data as an asset, while it's aways a liability for a company providing services; free, paid, or otherwise.

If I didn't happen to have the same email, I wouldn't have received the account deletion email to even check what was in there (and reset my password). A whole lot of early social internet content is gonna get poofed quite soon.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO social media got a little better once temporary stories came out. Slack’s limited search history is a feature too - forces you to document using appropriate tools and not endless email threads…

> Slack’s limited search history I'm sure that I don't know what you mean. My employer is on a paid plan for Slack, and searches cover everything, as far back as I wish to go. Are you thinking of the limitations on the free license?

Yes I mean free version which was good enough.

The other great thing about slack is that anyone from company can start an account without IT’s approval…

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you publish a book or magazine in France you’re required to give 2 copies to the national library for archive purpose. Doesn't something like that exist in other countries?

It certainly does in Spain. We even extended it to videogames, although I don't know how much that achieves when so many games are barely playable before the first few patches, have much of their content released in future updates and many are unplayable after the servers close.

Code source + Assets or binary?
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