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There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

theguardian.com

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#11
post #3

Probably a good reminder archive.org has a fundraiser going on right now. It would a sad day indeed to lose access to that resource.

Fundraiser with matching no less. Wikipedia doesn't need any more money, the Internet Archive is a far better use for a donation. And they don't use fake-urgency manipulation to beg for it either.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#12
Indeed, my primary use case for JellyFin is to archive media which is likely to disappear. The obscure, the weird, the niche films and TV from decades past - not relevant enough for a DVD release.

Some of this stuff, I search for years before finally finding it.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#13
post #3

Probably a good reminder archive.org has a fundraiser going on right now. It would a sad day indeed to lose access to that resource.

Every lawyer should be contributing. Wayback machine snapshots come up in court shockingly often.

Governments should be too. It's probably the cheapest way to get the most justice done to "just" have things durably publicly archived, not to mention historical research, adminstrative utility and so on. An equivalent amount of other "spending on justice", e.g. by actually funding various agencies properly would cost hundreds of millions at the least. Not to mention it's an extremely transparent way to do it.

Of course, there's not much juicy pork there: even if they cared about the cause, a real government is probably more likely to throw a few billion at Iron Mountain and G4S via McKinsey to fail to get a tiny fraction of the utility.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#14
post #6

There's an interesting dichotomy: As a single user, you must assume that anything you upload to the Internet will be there forever, because anyone can download a copy and maintain it. This means users need to be careful about privacy-sensitive information, controversial opinions, etc. But on a broader level we don't actually dedicate much effort at all to maintaining the bulk of what's posted online, meaning most imp…

Or to put it another way - the longevity of something on the Internet is the inverse of what you’d want it to be.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#15
post #5

Meta: the title is truncated and missing the last word, "ever".

Isn’t it one of the most ironic posts you’ve seen in a while because of that error? I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself.

Me too! I first thought it's the actual title of the article. Love it

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#16
post #5

Meta: the title is truncated and missing the last word, "ever".

Isn’t it one of the most ironic posts you’ve seen in a while because of that error? I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself.

The Nothing is eating the title.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#17
post #8

If you want something to stay online it will vanish in no time. If you want something disappear from the internet, it will stay there forever.

I had a friend who used to say, if you want to get rid of a weed, treat it like a crop.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#18

I read HN almost everyday and when there isn't much interesting topics (to me) I generally start browsing the same day in past years (e.g. I would be browsing 26th of December 2022 then 2021 and so on). Once you get few years back most links start breaking due to various reasons (websites being online, deleting the content, changes in url structure etc). I always thought it was sad, especially when I could see vibran…

Again it is one reason why I wish the history of a browser could take a snapshot of the page I read. At least as a prosumer, opt in feature.

I could afford to store those when storage is so cheap.

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#19
post #18

I read HN almost everyday and when there isn't much interesting topics (to me) I generally start browsing the same day in past years (e.g. I would be browsing 26th of December 2022 then 2021 and so on). Once you get few years back most links start breaking due to various reasons (websites being online, deleting the content, changes in url structure etc). I always thought it was sad, especially when I could see vibran…

Again it is one reason why I wish the history of a browser could take a snapshot of the page I read. At least as a prosumer, opt in feature. I could afford to store those when storage is so cheap.

There's ways this could be optimised too. Such as using page open time as a reference for what to save (if you open a tab and close it within within a few seconds then odds are you're not going to miss a snapshot of that page)

Re: There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for

#20

I read HN almost everyday and when there isn't much interesting topics (to me) I generally start browsing the same day in past years (e.g. I would be browsing 26th of December 2022 then 2021 and so on). Once you get few years back most links start breaking due to various reasons (websites being online, deleting the content, changes in url structure etc). I always thought it was sad, especially when I could see vibran…

This is one of the reasons Wikipedia switched to Wayback Machine URLs.

I wonder if HN could do something similar? Any link more than a year old defaults to a Wayback Machine URL?

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