“Anything you post on the internet will be there forever” meme is becoming less true these days. Closed gardens that get shutdown without any notice, dead links run rampant, full reliance on cloud vendors for data storage.
Then there are examples like Marion Stokes[2] who recorded 71000 tapes over 30 years.
Fast forward to today (ha ha), and I do think there is some justification for downloading 'pirate content' for archival purposes. In the same way that I think LibGen is a very important project even if it angers some.
To be clear, I believe in buying the items I'm actually going to read or watch to support the creators. Not just pirating everything.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/28/apollo-11-ta... [2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
― Linus Torvalds
However from a data integrity perspective you must hold the opposite perspective "Assume your copy is the only copy that exists", as you cannot guarantee other's have a copy of the data or will keep their copies.
I'm personally very worried about what the internet will look like in 15 years. How many awesome communities, blogs, projects, etc. will disappear?
Hacker News is the center of technology, just like the Usenet Groups were the center from the late 70s to the mid-90s, that must be preserved as computer history. Our generation can see how the Internet started and how 4.3BSD worked by reading the Usenet archives, the future generations deserve to be able doing the same, learn how the Silicon Valley in the 2010s worked by reading Hacker News archives.
Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard.
Mailing lists? Well, yes, but there are all single-topic forum.
Twitter? Probably, but it's not a forum, and it's even responsible for killing the forums.
Reddit? Those programming groups are large, but they are closer to newsfeed where you can submit links than a forum (Hacker News is also a newsfeed, but it's discussion-orientated, some people don't even read the news). Although some communities such as r/bitcoin has plenty of important history preserved here, but not a general-interest tech forum.
4chan? It has some historical significant for Internet subcultures, but probably not in general interest.
Chatrooms? Yes. Freenode is still big, Discord has a lot of communities, but they are not forums.
My conclusion about Hacker News being the center was after a long depression that the social media has killed large forums where long opinions are elaborated. But Hacker News is still kicking around, like it was 1995.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689391 (original comment deleted, reposted here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...)
The first difference is that Slashdot provides a summary of the news, so most Slashdot users do actually read the news, and makes a few points down in comment; unlike Hacker News, where many don't and just wait for a chance to jump in and post comments. Therefore, the contents are often of a different nature, HN is closer to a forum.
Also, the current Slashdot is truly different from early Slashdot. It seems to be more corporative and commercial. On early Slashdot, you can occasionally see interviews and book reviews dedicated to the community, you rarely see those post nowadays, if any. Also, in recent years, Slashdot implemented (or refused to implement) changes and created a strong opposition within a subgroup of users, and gave to birth of forks of smaller site.
While HN is still here and living well (I do know Lobster is a HN fork).
So both HN and Slashdot needs archives, and they should know better not to push for destructive upgrades that makes reading historical posts difficult. Both work well today, but I don't know what would happen in the future.
To me it's more of an very early reddit.
I think it slid into gradual irrelevance in the following decade, but I'm not sure there was any one moment that did it. Personally, I'd date its decline to 2011, perhaps not coincidentally shortly after founding editor Rob Malda left.
I'd never heard of Soylent News. I can't decide if I love or hate that name. :)
HN is the closest I can get to a replacement.
However it is important to not romanticize anything on the Internet too hard, speaking from my own disappointment. Hacker News for the duration that it is here is a valuable resource. Exploit it while you can, and be prepared to move on when you can’t.
I'll be fine for moving to whatever platform in the future, as long as it uses an open protocol, NNTP or HTTP, it doesn't matter.
My problem is when websites start pushing destructive upgrades that make reading historical posts difficult, for example, excluding them from index or completely screwing up the formatting.
Hopefully the Internet Archive Team will take care of it, if HN ever does it.
I mean you have to physically mine anything you want to save into an archive of your own. Exploit.
Sorry if this seems cynical, but if anything on the Internet is worth referring back to, it’s worth making your own copy or you should just assume that at some point you’ll never see it again. Fortunately it’s just text and hyperlinks. Even screenshots work if you OCR them somewhere down the line, though I don’t employ that method.
Shutdowns like this are well-planned and orderly compared to the much-more-common-than-anyone-wants-to-admit "woops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong directory", "woops, I ran fsck on a mounted disk" (which I literally did last night, fortunately without the deserved vaporization), or "woops, someone sold the wrong server and the hard drive is out in the wild now", followed up by the inevitable "woops, turns out the backups have been broken for the last 32 months, probably should've been checking that".
Historians are going to have a hard time moving forward. Until the last 15 years or so, when someone died, you could go collect "their papers" -- journals, letters, records, photos, and so on. The digital equivalent is scattered across dozens of personal devices and thousands of servers. Even if we're generous and assume that something like 20% of it will still exist when a person becomes deceased, the data is comingled in someone's crappy MySQL somewhere, or it's stored behind passwords, crypto keys, and other contraptions that are virtually unbreakable as compared against something like "call the locksmith".
As people age, I think these concerns will begin to be taken much more seriously, but it shows the crucial importance of fully utilizing things like the GDPR-mandated "fork over your data" export and becoming proficient in backup, archiving, and system forensics.
This is an area of some interest to me, so when my grandmother died a couple of years ago, I worked quickly to get a bit-for-bit copy of every user-accessible digital device in her house. I got almost everything, but a distant family member absconded with the iPad, which had been her primary computing device for the last couple of years of her life, before I could even get on a plane.
[Tangential pro-tip here: large files can and do lose bits. Create multiple copies, create parity files, and don't rely blindly on either RAID or filesystem-level checksums.]
Fortunately, she was in her mid-90s and while she enjoyed technology, she also maintained handwritten journals for over 50 years, so we still have the main records of her legacy. But things will be different for people not-all-that-much younger.
https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+netscape+browser+w...
Most of them even with the source code, as I released both the exe's and the source code back in the day.
It's a miracle that email has survived to this day using open protocols, but they're desperately trying to control that too using all kinds of blacklists and tricks to keep "regular" people out of setting up a private server.
That applies only to embarrassing stuff.