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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

> Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo.

Everything I wrote on Usenet has disappeared in the Google silo. So, there you have that - the inevitable fate of content is to disappear.

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So has everything I wrote, thank god. We're too obsessed with 'keeping' things. It's good that the internet doesn't remember to the degree we all (used to) think. Things that are worth preserving will be, but 99% of all content should just die a natural death. We shouldn't start to conserve for the sake of conserving because we can now that things are digital.

I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand I certainly tend towards a preservationist mindset and as the sibling comment notes, we don't really know what we should save for various reasons. The guy who is responsible for having saved a bunch of Usenet archives made a comment to the effect of: "I didn't realize that what we really should have prioritized was discussions about social issues, culture, etc.--not bug fixes for a long obsolete version of SunOS."

OTOH, I'm kind of glad that nothing I wrote that wasn't filtered by an editor from before maybe age 30 or so exists online. (And even the filtered stuff you probably would need to know where to look.)

What's worth preserving can't be known in advance.

What we think is worth preserving now isn't necessarily what the future will think we should have preserved. Most of papyrology is the study of ancient documents that were thrown in the trash.

I could 100% agree if things were gone for good, you know, like in real life. But the idea that what was meant for the public is no stowed away in a company silo and can be used, deleted or republished at their discretion rubs me the wrong way. Not that I would ever have posted something atrocious, but the idea that a company knows more about what I said than myself is deeply unsettling to me.

The content you want to stay disappears. The content you want to disappear stays forever.

Is there a law for that? Or is it an offshoot of the Streisand Effect?

It's probably just buried too deep to easily discover it. I was able to just do a search with an unusual term in it (part of an old email address) and I turned up Usenet/Google Groups postings.

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