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Internet Data Is Rotting

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Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#61
post #60

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it…

I encountered rot today when I was trying to repair a set of speakers. I found the guide on some audiophile forum, step by step with pictures for every removed screw and multiple angles. Only the pictures were originally hosted on photobucket and since retroactively removed. Some reddit users are egregious about it, installing scripts that overwrite their comments after x amount of time, seemingly oblivious to the fa…

Rot may actually be useful by allowing out-dated, inaccurate, or useless information to be removed or fall into obscurity.

Correct, useful, or noteworthy information is often re-posted and copied, leading to preservation.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#62

I’m okay with internet rot and you should be too. I’m not sure where we got the idea that “our data must be preserved forever”. This can be especially harmful for teens and young adults whose indiscretions now follow them forever. Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever. Let it…

I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) c…

That's fine only if these records are used as broad research tools that help provide context to a period in history or a public figures's life story.

If it's just going to be used as witchhunt fodder however than you can fuck right off with that.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) c…

I think if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that preserving the past does nothing to impede the changing moral zeitgeist. More records simply mean more people to attack for holding an opinion that has simply gone out of fashion. If the past decade wasn't characterized by tribalism and moral hysteria I'd be more inclined to worry about stringent preservation. At this point, I'm not really comfortable wi…

It's simple. Don't say ignorant things on the internet, especially when it's tied into your real life identity. Lots of people struggle with this simple rule, because they have a compulsion to share their own myopic opinion (usually the same viral opinion as everyone else in their echo chamber) and contribute to the noise. If I was a public figure I wouldn't be on any social media platform at all, at best it wastes your already limited and highly valuable time.

That being said, there's a lot of valuable information on the internet that is absolutely worth preserving. Scrape off the layer of social media and the internet is still a place of learning and problem solving. I do my own repairs on my car and the amount of times I've found a well written photo essay on a particular fix in a random honda forum, only to find the linked pictures broken, is astounding and a shame to say the least.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm OK with it because otherwise you are whitewashing history. For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) c…

I think if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that preserving the past does nothing to impede the changing moral zeitgeist. More records simply mean more people to attack for holding an opinion that has simply gone out of fashion. If the past decade wasn't characterized by tribalism and moral hysteria I'd be more inclined to worry about stringent preservation. At this point, I'm not really comfortable wi…

That's just it! We Should elect people who have a stronger moral code than it takes to be fashionable.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that preserving the past does nothing to impede the changing moral zeitgeist. More records simply mean more people to attack for holding an opinion that has simply gone out of fashion. If the past decade wasn't characterized by tribalism and moral hysteria I'd be more inclined to worry about stringent preservation. At this point, I'm not really comfortable wi…

It's simple. Don't say ignorant things on the internet, especially when it's tied into your real life identity. Lots of people struggle with this simple rule, because they have a compulsion to share their own myopic opinion (usually the same viral opinion as everyone else in their echo chamber) and contribute to the noise. If I was a public figure I wouldn't be on any social media platform at all, at best it wastes y…

Who gets to decide what's ignorant? What if I'm being sensible about what's ignorant, but I can't predict how society will feel in the future?

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#66
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it's that preserving the past does nothing to impede the changing moral zeitgeist. More records simply mean more people to attack for holding an opinion that has simply gone out of fashion. If the past decade wasn't characterized by tribalism and moral hysteria I'd be more inclined to worry about stringent preservation. At this point, I'm not really comfortable wi…

It's simple. Don't say ignorant things on the internet, especially when it's tied into your real life identity. Lots of people struggle with this simple rule, because they have a compulsion to share their own myopic opinion (usually the same viral opinion as everyone else in their echo chamber) and contribute to the noise. If I was a public figure I wouldn't be on any social media platform at all, at best it wastes y…

> It's simple. Don't say ignorant things on the internet, especially when it's tied into your real life identity.

Kind of like saying “People who go to prison just shouldn’t commit crimes.” I don’t believe in making a case equivalence here.

Being publicly prosecuted has just as much to do with “who” you are as “what” you did. I’m personally not fine with this distinction.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#67
post #48
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so important to blame someone now for something they haven't said publicly in over 13 years?

Because he said it on public broadcast. And i believe public broadcasts are the least likely to be deleted from the internet. Private stuff , or things said in a small circle of social network friends are much less important.

Personally I reserve the unalienable right to change my mind. What do you do when you’re wrong?

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#68
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he said it on public broadcast. And i believe public broadcasts are the least likely to be deleted from the internet. Private stuff , or things said in a small circle of social network friends are much less important.

Personally I reserve the unalienable right to change my mind. What do you do when you’re wrong?

The scariest people are the ones who never change their mind on anything.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#69
post #58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Yeah, I'm going to need some proof for that. Eddie Murphy's '80s HBO standup routines are available in full on YouTube, and some of that material is absurdly homophobic. He isn't a pariah by any means. People do see nuance and understand that values and mores change over time, and what might have been socially acceptable at on…

Eddie Murphy is black. Like Kevin Hart is too. GLAAD and the left are very careful in calling out homophobic views of black people, and instead of calling for their resignation or "cancelation" as they would for a white person, they are instead demanding for "this to be a teachable moment" > GLAAD: Kevin Hart ‘Shouldn’t Have Stepped Down’ as Oscars Host, but Used Gig to Bring Unity https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/g…

You'll have to provide something more concrete than "the left lets black people off easy" when your parent comment indicates that Stephen Colbert, a white man, is supposedly getting off easy as we speak.

Re: Internet Data Is Rotting

#70
post #16

This needs to be solved on the protocol level. Of course, the players who have control over our protocols are exactly the people who don't want this to be solved at all. The next best thing would be to redefine what "bookmarking" is. When I bookmark a page, I want it to be permanently stored on my local machine and full-text indexed. In fact, it's rather ridiculous that after 25 years browsers don't have anything of…

Tangentially related, but the reader view of a page seems ideally suited for archival bookmarking. It's unfortunate that so many sites seem to be intentionally breaking the reader view functionality in order to maximize newsletter subscriptions and eyeball monetization. Recipe sites are the worst offenders IMO.

Pocket seems to have luck where other reader views and outlining services fail, and you can set up IFTTT to download pocket articles as html files to dropbox, but that's certainly not automatic and completely out of your way. I would have preferred it to archive as a plain text document but I couldn't figure it out through IFTTT.
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