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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it'd cost the BBC millions to maintain those pages means jack.

People were going to lose access to that information, and now they aren't. That's really all that matters. With torrents, the burden is on "everyone" only if they really want to keep it up.

edit: Reasoning for downvotes would be appreciated. The BBC has a long history of recklessly losing valuable data. See kgtm's link to previous yc post on this topic.

edit #2: Oh, okay, I see what's going on. When I said "means jack", I didn't mean to imply that the BBC should spend inordinate amounts to keep the data up. What I meant was: Yes, it might have cost them to do it, but look, like what this guy did, there are other ways to keep the data archived. Hell, I'm sure some people would even settle for a CD archive or something.

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It does not mean 'jack', it means money that comes from license fee payers would be spent, I am not justifying their removal, but it's overly simplistic to reduce it to a mere discussion of storage costs, the BBC has a responsibility to maintain and support their offerings, it's not rocket science to see that doing that will cost money. Nice that someone has archived that data, I truly appreciate that, moving forward though I think it would be more useful to look at where money is spent and discuss that real issue, not get sidelined with quips and digs at a truly unique organisation that has long set standards in media of all varieties.

As far as losing valuable data, well okay, they maybe blanked a few copies of Doctor Who here and there, but it was not considered valuable at the time, and as always cost was a factor then as it is now, it's easy to pass judgement with hindsight.

> The BBC has a long history of recklessly losing valuable data

This is quite a fascinating topic in itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_BBC_episodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

Erasing master tapes of actual shows is one thing; not bothering to preserve promotional web pages for eternity isn't even in the same ballpark.

In fact I see it more as them picking up after themselves.

I agree that BBC should have done something to preserve the content in some form, not necessarily as easily accessible and readable. Heck, they could've packed it up and put it out as a torrent which they would seed themselves and it would've been better than just dumping it.

I upvoted you because I agree about the content, so I can only speculate about downvotes. If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably because you either missed or ignored the point you replied to, which is that the reporting was, indeed, terrible.

Actually he's probably being downvoted because he's taken a simplistic view to what is a complicated issue, and he's being pretty free with my tax pounds :)

You're saying that archiving the data, or packaging it up in a torrent rather than just throwing it away is a waste of money?

"means jack"

Actually it doesn't mean jack. that's my money they'd be using, and from a quick scan of those websites, i'm happy for them to disappear.

For some reason, many people seem to have decided that all data is important and there's an almost fetishistic devotion to saving everything that can be saved. Not all information needs to be preserved for all time.

> Not all information needs to be preserved for all time.

I disagree, and strongly. Future historians will probably disagree with you too. Even the most inane TV shows can prove to be extremely valuable when trying to decipher the culture of various countries 300 or 3000 years in the past. Imagine reading a trashy romance novel from 1000 BC. You'd learn a lot about the people who lived in that time.

You might counter this by saying that with all the information out there now, we only need to keep the "good stuff". But who decides what's good, right now? How do you know that what you decide is good will always be seen as good? Your personal opinions on the content disappearing are totally irrelevant when perhaps millions of people have seen it or have been affected by it.

All information that is created should be saved, especially since we're able to. Imagine the ancient Romans deciding to burn a bunch of books because it cost too much to hire guards for the library. Ouch.

Mind, I don't think future historians will weep too much about losing some promotional websites for such actual content.

Is the downvote above because someone disagrees, or because the downvoter is just completely unaware of the nature of the sites being taken down?

Most of these sites are promo fluff for BBC TV shows. Some are cancelled, some are for news show with little more "content" than "This show next comes on --- on BBC -".

Most of these sites would be dismissed as "marketing" if the BBC were a for-profit company. Marketing for defunct products. The rest is material that's being legitimately archived elsewhere.

(OT: I didn't downvote you above; in fact, I can't, since you replied to my comment I think. However, note that many of us frequently accidentally downvote instead of upvote and can't undo it, especially on mobile touch-browsers if we're not zoomed-in enough for a big arrow)

I've occasionally done that myself, but I then post a note that I meant to upvote.

In your analogy, instead of burning the books they could just dump them in big trash heaps in Egypt, or in jars in Palestine, which correspond to bittorrenting quite nicely.

I agree with you, but practically, not all information can be kept.

There are teams of people right now deciding what is 'good' (i.e. what is kept) and what is shredded. They're called archivists, and, using their judgement in conjunction with government-created records retention schedules, they're culling both government and private records. This culled information is removed for a variety of reasons, space being one of the most prominent. By such means is the pool of available primary sources that will form the basis for future histories created by underpaid and underfunded but well-meaning bureaucrats.

Sounds like the same situation obtains not only in the dead-tree archives but also in the digital ones. Sigh. I wish people would prioritize our cultural legacy first instead of last when it comes to funding.

We don't have the ability to preserve all information for all time. Storage media decays, formats obsolete, storage imposes cost, space and time considerations that are non-zero and non-trivial.

If these sites were a special instance of our culture, then fine. But they're not. We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived for all time to understand culture. A good sample is way better.

These are different times to the classical era. We have a glut of information, most of which, once archived, will never be looked at again, and will only cost money until finally abandoned.

"We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived"

I'm sympathetic to preserving the shows themselves.

Their promotional pages on the BBC site when they're no longer in first-run? Feh.

I went to a museum once where they just kept everything, I learnt 2 things, one, that the first radio batteries came in more varieties than we have today, and two, never go to a museum that try's to keep everything...

"We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived for all time to understand culture."

Speak for yourself!

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