Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.
This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics.
What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately.
We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it.
You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.
> In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently.
This certainly doesn't apply to Latin, which survives today as several robust living languages. We can easily determine how the sounds of Latin changed without making reference to graffiti.
(And of course, the formal literature has quite a bit to say on the sounds of the language, too.)
I think you underestimate just how grateful historical linguists are for popular texts beyond literary ones. Another example is the Novgorod birchbark letters, which not only shed light on old Russian but some of their features (found in no other source) required scholars to completely revise their reconstruction of Slavic historical phonology in general.
And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera.
It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258
Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.
Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.