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Comment by majkinetor | Hacker News Reader

LOL. Its probably too much for new generation too.

My daughter is amazingly apt at not paying for content. You’d be surprised.

While I agree with you, it's not as simple as it seems. One of the crucial skills we have to learn in the digital age is to discard information. Historically, we have evolved as hoarders: keeping valuable things usually pays off.[0] With information, it's no longer the case. You don't have scarcity like with physical goods: there is more available than you can absorb during many lifetimes. So we need to develop the crucial skill of discerning between the top stuff you really want and need - and everything else that should be discarded. Based on my limited personal experience, this is not always easy but improves with time.

[0] Marie Kondo would disagree

I don't get it, this is not a house with limited square footage. Discarding is of almost zero importance, in fact, you have it logically backwards because discarding incurs a cost of investing your precious time to make a decision. While retaining only requires you to have an amorphous blob somewhere, a non-event. This is especially true for things tens of megs to a few gigs. Of course not yet true for 4K videos, but we are approaching that point not year by year as cost per TB approaches 0.

By saving stuff, you future proof the high possiblity that it becomes completely unavailable anywhere online and you have the last copy. And you can easily find it by search, I have this happen all the time. In many cases the audio cassettes that accompany an old pedagogic text have been digitized by one person who shares a zip one time and then the link dies forever. Ten years later when I finally free up time to study the material, it will be too late.

The important skill: don't download or even browse crap you certainly won't use within your lifetime. It is a time sink. Develop a strong preference for only looking for things you'll immediately begin studying or have a concrete plan to study in the coming 6mos.

> With information, it's no longer the case.

It isn't always like that. If your data is on somebody else's platform (as for the author's data) your data is gone, possibly for good.

And by the way... onljne communities (and websites in general) come and go. The data you're relying upon today might not be there tomorrow (or it could get altered someway).

Information hording is not only concerned with information availability, also with information presentation, stability, liquidity (non mainstream information may be very hard to find later) etc.

> One of the crucial skills we have to learn in the digital age is to discard information.

For some things yes, for TV shows and movies eh. For roughly the price of a year of netflix you could get a 14TB hard drive, which would hold six continuous months of high quality 1080p video. It's also really easy to keep those things sorted with negligible clutter and wasted time.

> With information, it's no longer the case. You don't have scarcity like with physical goods: there is more available than you can absorb during many lifetimes.

As much as this is technically true, anything not currently on your hardware can, and probably will, get snatched away from you, usually without warning, regardless of it you paid for it.

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