How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everything is transient I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for it, host it and publicize it
Every future historian is hissing at you right now. So much of the past is completely opaque to us because of decay, intentional destruction and lack of interest. I think there's a moral imperative to preserve.
Things that are important to society will naturally be preserved. I believe in the moral right to be forgotten.
We cannot, and should not, preserve all of knowledge forever.
Don't get me wrong, I love the internet archive, and the team behind it are incredible. As a resource it's very important to maintain and preserve. However, I'm sure that at some point, either due to the economics of it or through hardware failure, the content saved by the AI will begin to be lost. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I quite like the fragility of it, it makes it more apparent that everything is transient. In a way I wish the IA had a half life on content, that it would decay over time, pages and images would be randomly deleted. Little by little it would rot and become nothing, a reflection of humanity. I suppose that's the internet itself...
> everything is transient I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for it, host it and publicize it
Yes. Both content but also the technology to display this content. I put this on my personal web page 21 years ago:
http://trondal.com/magisk/magic.html
At the time (or maybe a few years before), clicking this button would show a dropdown menu linking to a bunch of web pages. Now, the button doesn't work anymore and I think most of the links go to missing content.
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#24How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?
The original URL of the photo was actually found on Twitter, where it had been posted in 2011. Wayback Machine was used only for the final confirmation. It's curious that this is not mentioned in the article, but I suppose it ruins the narrative.
I read about the whole thing last week at 404media, via waxy blog, which is a much more comprehensive article: https://archive.is/sj846
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#25>This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the original source of the image Why do they say it's likely that the person who first posted the image on the message board got the image from the Internet Archive?
My guess is because the image didn’t exist in other archives and it’s a very obscure site so why would someone have seen that? More probable they stumbled on something random like this in the wild or on Internet Archive?
Why would someone have been looking at an very obscure site on the Internet Archive? Why is that more likely than looking at it on the web?
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everything is transient I agree. Permanence should be tied to individual wills, not collective inertia. If you want a permanent thing, work for it, host it and publicize it
Every future historian is hissing at you right now. So much of the past is completely opaque to us because of decay, intentional destruction and lack of interest. I think there's a moral imperative to preserve.
[deleted]
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the same thing. If you look at the crawled page, it's only one of like 20 images that survived. So either the crawl got lucky and saved the only relevant image, or there is survivor bias. Then again, the actual crawl might be triggered precisely because the image was linked.
What do you mean there is survivorship bias? That the only image used is the one that survived? Or it survived because it was used? Something I noticed was that all other jpgs in this site have a lager number in the filename, for example: www.hobbytownoshkosh.com/Dsc00348.jpg So maybe the crawler that saved this webpage had a limit on how many suburls it would capture and it sorted by name and then stopped at around…
That might have been the 161st image taken by an old Sony camera.
Cyber-shot model names use a DSC prefix, which is an initialism for "Digital Still Camera".
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#28See you all in the backrooms
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#29How did people hunting for the origin of this image discover the random niche website preserved by the Internet Archive that this image happened to come from?
Up until last month, the earliest known post/repost of the Backrooms image was an archived 4chan post from 2018, but it was believed to have been taken in 2012 or earlier based on the filename. So people have been looking for earlier posts/reposts of the image for years in an effort to uncover its origin.
During the recent successful search, the searchers trawled 4chan archives for early-2010s posts with similar image metadata to the 2018 Backrooms image copy. These archives were missing the original image files and thumbnails, but still retained some image metadata that could be filtered on (dimensions, image file md5s etc.) One of the searchers came up with a list of posts which might have originally included the image file, based on image metadata and context. Another searcher plugged the image md5 of one of these candidate posts (an April 2011 post recently added to an archive) into other archives, and hit on a post with a thumbnail matching the original Backrooms image from March 2011. At this point they'd finally found an earlier copy of the image, after years of searching.
Soon after, one of the searchers plugged the filename of the March 2011 post into Twitter's search, and came up with a post from 2019 which included the physical address and a link to the image source (this Twitter user had already found the source before the search had really begun, but it had gone unremarked upon at the time). The website had been replaced with blogspam in the interim. A searcher plugged this domain into waybackmachine and found a page with the image and a full explanation (it was taken during the renovation of a commercial property in Wisconsin).
Post from one of the searchers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/backrooms/comments/1d3pkif/how_the_...
Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
#30I didn't know about the old meme, but the image made me immediately think of The Stanley Parable. Not surprising since TSP is probably a descendant of the meme.
Stanley Parable outdates Backrooms by like 8 years. But they’re all basically about liminal spaces.
TSP isn't really about liminal space, it's about narrative decision making and the consequences of trying to account and develop for that in video games. I suppose you could say that it uses the liminal space of a barren office to achieve an awkward atmosphere that is meant to make you question everything about it, but that's a really small aspect of the game as a whole.