Hacker News Reader

Comment by allenz | Hacker News Reader

If you have the firehose, it is easy to derive the selective archive by filtering on the list of noteworthy accounts. Ignoring monetary costs, archiving the firehose is strictly better than selective archival. It enables future researchers to examine trends on a societal scale.

View on HN

It does, at the cost of preserving the firehose, through endless format and media shifts, and at the cost and under the assumption that future historians will want an archive they need a strong AI to manage. There is also the cost, as in paying people and buying equipment, drawn from an already overextended budget.

Frankly, the firehose will be considered priceless in 100 years. The accounts and tweets that we care about now will also probably be the least valuable. Historians and archaeologists will generally take one grocery list over a thousand sweet nothings from politicians and celebrities.

Preserving minutiae for future archaeologists is a bold and exciting idea which should be funded and pursued. It is not however, the mission of the LoC.

Edit: not to mention that I think you have a far too rosy view of the world we’ll be leaving for people 100 years from now.

Agreed. Hell, I've recovered old hard drive backups from ~10 years ago and have been fascinated by by what I've found. Old e-mails and chat logs and stuff can be very entertaining to dig through.

Or find things that seemed insignificant at the time but became significant later with hindsight.

not to mention the fact that twitter is basically millions of monkeys banging away at keyboards, eventually they will produce some great works.

For values of “eventually” which include timescales on the order of proton decay...

...like a particular painter and WW1 veteran in Germany that the than current art world dismissed...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com