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Comment by patrick5415 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it’s annoying that links get broken. But maybe it’s better this way. There’s something about modern tech that has turned all of us into digital horders. I (we?) have backups and backups of backups and redundant RAID servers with every version of every file so that no byte shall ever perish. I have essays still that I wrote in highschool nearly 20 years ago. To what end? I’m partial to material minimalism. Why not data minimalism?

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My common response is that there are real world costs to having too much stuff, data is pretty small to keep around. You can fit a RAID 5 box with 30 TB of space in a shoebox for $15/month, that is enough to keep pretty much any content that you ever consume so that if you want anything it still exists. My parents and grandparents hoarded files and documents to no end and I have been going through some of them and there is mostly garbage but there is some real gems in the rough. Willingly disposing of the internet through our own negligence is something I don't advocate for because there is some sort of value preserved in what we save for the next generation.

There are real-world costs to information hoarding as well, when it's done by people who are not you and whose incentives are not aligned with your own.

I'm glad that data is rotting on the Internet. In fact, I'll go one step farther and say that data should rot more quickly on the Internet. There's no reason that some scummy marketing algorithm should have access to my high-school social media posts. There's no reason that governments or private individuals with a grudge ought to be able to through the history of everything I've written, no matter how off-the-cuff, in order to dredge up something that makes me look like an undesirable when it's taken out of context.

If an individual wants to save a particular piece of information, that should be their choice. Otherwise, by default, information ought to disappear from the Internet.

I think that in terms of what you are talking about bitrot is good. People should have their stuff deleted after a while but there is a sense of permanentness in internet culture and that should change to one of fleetingness which more bitrott may actually bring about causing more people to back up their own stuff instead of leaving it to these companies.

Oh, that's a simple one: lack of time. I too have some very old data in an archive that's on some old hard drive somewhere in a storage. Assuming the HD still works, I could go in there, destroy the data, and trash it. But I'm fairly certain I will never find a moment to do so.

Managing what data you keep is just too time consuming. Hoarding it all is simpler.

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