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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

My problem with "digital decay" is that it's much more "binary" - it's working or it's completely unusable. When the reception gets fuzzy on digital TV, you simply can't watch the station where as an analog signal has varying levels of decay.

If you have a hard drive full of images and it fails, it's all gone (better have a backup!), but if you have a box full of photos and your house floods, some of them may still be around.

Analog fades, digital dies, unless it's constantly resuscitated. When you think about it how many times have you found an old photo that you probably wouldn't have kept if you had the choice? Or some old photos or music at your grandparent's house.

What are my grand kids going to find at my house?

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Your grandkids are going to web search for your name and find digital scraps of your life.

But the problem is that "information on the web" must be kept alive constantly. Everything to do with digital storage is far more transient than a hard copy of a book or a photo.

With a book or a photo, the storage of information, and it's mechanism for display are one and the same. With all digitally encoded media, one must have the appropriate decoder.

If I keep a journal on wordpress.com, it can't be left to grow old and musty, with no effort. It decays absolutely the instant it is not being maintained, where as if I keep a journal on a notepad, it can take up a tiny amount of physical space in the real world, and lie somewhere unmaintained for centuries without decaying to the point of unusability.

As the speed of information creation and transfer has increased, so too has the longevity of that information decreased. From stone tablets, to papyrus, to SMS messages stored on an SD card - the volume of the world's information is now increasing at an astounding rate but would archaeologists be able to discover it thousands of years from now?

If you put your photos on Facebook, they will probably be available forever. They will certainly be available for your grandkids' lifetimes.

I'm not so sure.

A few years ago a similar statement could have been made about Myspace or friendster a few years before that. Would you be willing to make such a statement about either company today?

Would you have been willing to make such a statement about geocities 5 years ago?

No and no. Neither MySpace nor Friendster ever had anything near a half billion users. Facebook has gotten to the point where the government would step in if they wanted to destroy all of the photos.

Mostly, I think Facebook has achieved the status of a utility. It is entrenched, with a solid business model. It's drastically different than Myspace and Friendster in that way. They were just fads.

Also, GeoCities was at least partially saved. As we develop more computing infrastructure of all kinds, that kind of thing becomes more an more likely.

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