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The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

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Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#81

Post by b112 »

oooyay wrote: post #32
msephton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is actually kinda fascinating given that it's directly in opposition to this blog post. I wonder who's telling the truth?

This seems very unfair. There's absolutely no point, anywhere in that IA blog post, that says "We found it". Anywhere! They're just providing information on the history of the file, from their archives, and detail into why it's an amusing story.

They even say

Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being “found” travels throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged. For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”.

How is that taking credit?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#82

Post by b112 »

sparky_z wrote: post #35
dooglius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the obscure site had not existed for years when the copypasta first appeared. So someone would have had to have found that obscure site and then saved the image for years before using it. Honestly, both options (website or archive) sound pretty unlikely to me. I'm wondering if instead it was a third option: maybe the originator of the copypasta was the person who originally took the photo. It would make sense…

Or a fourth. The world is filled with a myriad of people, and we all have weird hobbies and drives. I can see an 'artistic type' of person, seeing an image and thinking "Oh, that's grungy" or some other label to the room/etc.

And "collecting" it. EG, saving it.

Some people will stare at live ants for hours, others collect rocks. I can imagine a person out of billions, liking "weird, musty rooms" or some such.

But who knows, heh.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#83

Post by Nition »

mikae1 wrote: post #77
firecall wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a subreddit for Open Directories!

There's an even more fitting (inactive) subreddit for filename searches here: https://old.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX/ Here's a list of prefixes to search for: IMG XXXX MVI XXXX MOV XXXX 100 XXXX DSC XXXX SAM XXXX HDV XXXX 102APPLE IMG XXXX FILEXXXX GOPRXXXX

There's also the excellent http://astronaut.io, which I found via Hacker News. It automatically plays short segments from YouTube videos with those default filenames, inevitably surfacing a kind of gallery of the mundane: The unproduced, untargeted, mostly unwatched, everyday moments of real life.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#84

Post by nextaccountic »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #75
dither8 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually do this with YouTube. By search for MOV001 etc. Mental Outlaw did a video demonstrating this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ho_KDPi_U

Good luck “searching” for anything on YouTube in 2024..

It's 2024 and need a search engine that doesn't suck

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#85

Post by 3abiton »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #57

“ However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.” Something people used to do is to use search engines to find images with file names that indicate they were from a digital camera. You could find all sorts of interesting…

This reminds me of opendirectories subreddit. So many random stuff.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#86

Post by celdon25 »

msephton wrote: post #55
Thorentis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so, the Internet Archive was not involved at all in finding the original, but since the image exists in the archive, IA have written a blog post claiming to be crucial to its discovery? Seems like taking credit for something they didn't do to be honest. They didn't even mention the Tweet in the blog post which was essential to finding the image, which makes me think they want that part overlooked.

I think it's part of the recent trend to not mention Twitter/X because of its owner.

Any evidence for this or just mentioning it because you can?

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#87

Post by grishka »

Why are most of the images missing on that page though?

It's not the first time I notice this — sometimes some images or SWFs or other resources on a page would be just gone, with "hrm, the wayback machine hasn't archived this URL" with seemingly no rhyme or reason. It's just kinda odd that this article talks about finding an image and points you to a page where only 2 out of 14 images were preserved without addressing this.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#88

Post by joenot443 »

b112 wrote: post #81
oooyay wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually kinda fascinating given that it's directly in opposition to this blog post. I wonder who's telling the truth?

This seems very unfair. There's absolutely no point, anywhere in that IA blog post, that says "We found it". Anywhere! They're just providing information on the history of the file, from their archives , and detail into why it's an amusing story. They even say Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being “found” travels throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged. For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeba…

I think it’s usually pretty customary to attribute the original source if you’re going to write an exposition. They go through enough work explaining exactly the location of the furniture store, you’d think they’d have the courtesy to link to the tweet which actually made the discovery.

As has been pointed out though, IA has a pretty tenuous relationship with the Musk/chan adjacent parts of the internet, so it doesn’t surprise me they deliberately left those facts out.

Re: The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

#90

Post by password4321 »

dither8 wrote: post #72
houseplant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so on. That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these mysterious things

You can actually do this with YouTube. By search for MOV001 etc. Mental Outlaw did a video demonstrating this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ho_KDPi_U

http://astronaut.io/ - YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225

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