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Comment by hvocode | Hacker News Reader

Not everything is deserving of being treated as historical artifacts worthy of retention. A friend has lamented that when he was in college in the late 80s, he used USENET as a way to connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges. Retaining his personal struggles is hardly "history" - if anything, the historical value of retaining the struggles of one inconsequential person is far lower than the direct impact a google search has on his life today. So as you said, some things aren't as important as you think - in his case, privacy and respect are a bit more important than a historical record of a teenager seeking people to talk to. Every minute detail of history isn't as important as you think.

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You'd be surprised from what is considered history. Nowadays, insights into the lives and emotions of ordinary people are considered invaluable tool in recreating the past: the context in which political, economical, and cultural developments happened. In fact, the spontaneous nature of certain artifacts makes them more valuable, because what we would call "official history" is always editorialized and subject to the influence of only few people and not produced by the entire society it originates from.

It is something that I've thought about - the contradiction between privacy and the need to communicate yourself to the generations to come and the broadcast into the void it requires. If your friend is okay with his privacy in the archives, he might be glad to know that in hundred years, there will be an AI whose PHD will be on the emotional significance of new technologies in the lives of early adopters of the Internet, the case of user John Smith 1988.

I think the biggest difference/problem is that these people are still alive in many cases, whereas the authors of historical letters are not. This is a big difference, I think.

O, yes, I agree. It would be ideal if peoples actions are like state archives (accessible 50 years after the fact). However, I wanted to underline how inconsequential people actually matter in history.

Once you publicly post something, or even post something privately to someone else, it’s not entirely yours anymore, in an important sense it’s theirs.

Yes Usenet used to gave a spool lifetime, but that was clearly variable and there were no guarantees about it. Anybody could set up a mirror and frequently did. Also anyone could copy out content to other media and there was no expectation that they couldn’t do that.

We are all responsible for what we post to other people and in some cases also the effect it has on them. Consider bullying, abuse, criminal conspiracy, the record of receiving a message belongs to the receiver not the sender.

Every single minute detail is exactly equally important, because you, nor I, nor anyone, has any idea what will be important or why it will be important.

To a sociologist

connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges

is a goodmine and insight into history.

Not sure why the sociologist’s desires should take precedence over the original posters’.

When pompeii was discovered we saw into homes 1,000 years ago. Without any regard to privancy for those covered in rock we broadcast their lives around the globe.

I don't think we give a lot of weight to what the original publishing intent was for anything published 100, 200 years ago, why would the change in the future?

Hence the old joke, "At what point does graverobbing become archaeology?"

When you can publish it?

Without publishing it rather becomes tomb raiding even after thousands of years

100 years ago is very different than thirty-years ago.

I think, judging what is going to be of value for people in the future is a much harder problem than you make it out to be.

Yep, see sociologists and archaeologists excitement over finding things like clay tablets with shopping lists or recipes on.

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